Year Planner for Teachers

I have created a planner a variety of ways. In the more recent years I have used this year planner from Dragonflies in First. Traci thought of everything you need in a year plan and included it in her product. I printed the planner out poster size and it was very helpful to use. My only trouble with it was that it was in Excel. As computer savvy as I like to think I am, Excel is just not my favorite. Traci does give you VERY detailed directions and makes it user friendly though! 

This summer I was ready to try something new. My friend Jill from First Grade Made must have been reading my mind. She wrote about her year planner and posted it as a freebie in her store here. I was inspired about it and decided to use her template to create mine this year. 

With her template, my year planner is one page per month. I keep it in my planning binder and use it to plan both monthly and weekly. Once a month I sit down with the planner and my lesson plans (I keep those on my Google Drive) and fill in all of the curriculum programs that I am supposed to hit. Then, weekly, I fine-tune the plans by adding in more details and adjusting if necessary.

Sitting down to create a year planner seems like a daunting task. It is and it isn’t. If your school is similar to mine with a lot of programs to implement – it simply means getting out all of your binders and plugging in the units. This usually takes me a few hours to do. You do not need to be super specific – you just need a general idea of where you are going. I often find that I have weeks here and there where I get to plan to do more fun seasonal curricular things because I know I will make it to the end of the year in my programs. If I didn’t have a year plan I may not know this!

How do you plan out your year for success? I would love to hear about it!