Planning with Post-Its

I enjoy lesson planning in the abstract, thing-about-it, daydreaming kind of way, but I've never had a way that I can really write down my plans that I love. Thankfully I'm not required to turn in plans or write full-blown,  multi-page formal lesson plans like I did when student teaching... but I still like to have things planned in a way that I can use them and also have space to write down what I actually accomplished with each class in my plan book. I like both a pre-written plan and a reminder of what we got done. This becomes extra tricky because I use the same plan for multiple classes of the same grade level, but might get to different points in the lesson with each class. Enter my new plan book and post its!

I decided to treat myself to a new planner at Michael's this year rather than going crazy trying to make my own sheets. I chose The Big Happy Planner: Teacher Edition.

First, I have to say it: this planner is so cute! It's also really functional, I promise. Before I started going crazy with post its it looked like this:

The weekly view is where I'm planning to use post-its to plan lessons. I cut a bunch of post-its to the size of the boxes. I used the August pages as placeholders for the post-its since I won't teach in August. Each color will be one week's lessons, I made enough for each grade level in each week:

My plan is to use each week of post-its to write my plans on for each class for that week. I labelled them so they don't get mixed up, writing the grade level and the lesson number.

My plan is to stick the post-it on the first time I have to teach that lesson. For example, here's the first week:

What's super nice about this set-up is that I can just move the post-it when I'm done teaching the lesson and write what we actually did in the box so I can refer back to it later. I'll be moving the post-its forward to the next time I need to teach the lesson. What's really handy about this is that sometimes when we have days off of school I don't see a class and have to use a previous lesson with them - now I'll have the post-it on their spot in my planner to remind me. Believe it or not, I'll still be using my first week lessons on September 17th thanks to 2 Monday holidays in a row, so there will be a lot of lessons to keep straight the first month of school. I plan to keep the post-its after I'm done using them so I can refer to them in the future (past plan books help me keep my sanity and improve my pacing).

That's how I'm planning with post-its this year! Hopefully it works well, I'll try to remember to write an update once I've used it a little bit. So far I love the Happy Planner! 

Teacher DIY: Re-purposing old white boards

Visual art is not my strong suit, but I still tried to take one a couple DIY projects for school this summer. Right now, I'm working on re-purposing some old student white boards in very rough shape. The white boards from my classroom are at least 12 years old, and I was lucky enough to be able to buy new ones with budget money last year. I could have just tossed the old ones, but since I don't have clipboards, I have used them as a hard surface for kids to use under their paper when doing written work. My students often do written work when there's a substitute, and telling the substitute to have students get white boards led to a lot of confusion, so I decided to take away the white board surfaces and call them "clipboards" to make everyone's life a little easier.

Knowing that these boards would get quite a bit of use, and that my students don't always stay on the paper when coloring, I decided that basic black would be the best color for durability and aesthetic purposes. I grabbed some glossy spray paint from Home Depot, making sure it said that it could be used on plastic.

Now here's one of those times this teacher didn't do what she always tells the students to do: I didn't follow the directions. The directions said to sand glossy surfaces, and I read them, but ain't nobody got time for that. I decided to try out just spraying them and seeing what happened. It still worked! They aren't perfect, but the boards look a lot better than they did and not sanding saved me a lot of time.

I put down newspaper in the garage, laid out the boards, and started spraying away! Here's some "before" pictures:

And "after":

They're not "Pinterest perfect" but they will help my students by giving them a durable hard surface to serve the purpose of a clipboard (without the annoying clips that pinch fingers and break) without costing a lot of money.