Lesson Planning Made Easy!

Howdy, folks! It's Andrew from Mr. First Grade! I've got SO many things to share with all of you that it was hard for me to decide! This month I wanted to share with you a lesson planning template that has changed my life. Some of you may be familiar with it, but if there's anyone out there that hasn't heard of it, I highly recommend checking it out!!

Ok. A little history lesson. When I first started teaching, I printed out a template for the whole week. It all fit on one page. The boxes were too small. I hated writing it all down. So I used the same template, but on the computer. I had to carry my flash drive with me everywhere I went. The fonts I used at home weren't on my school laptop and I got angry. Then I bought one of those uber expensive fancy planners that everyone was raving about. It wasn't for me. I loved it at first, mostly because it was shiny and it had my name on it. But it all came back to the fact that I was hand writing out all my plans and I was bound to the size of those dang boxes.

*In comes planbook.com*

There are so many things I love about this website. No, I'm not being paid to write a review, I just love it that much and want to help out some fellow teachers! There are SO many components to this software, but I wanted to point out some of my favorites... First of all, the entire thing is customizable... If you teach high school math, this will work for you. If you're a reading specialist, this will work for you. I use Daily 5 in my classroom, so I wanted highly specific time constraints in my plans. THIS ALLOWED ME TO DO IT.

When you first sign up, you will not have any classes to plan for. You've got to make your classes. The site is SO customizable that you can even schedule the same class for different times on different days, or set it to not happen on certain days, etc.  Hello, block scheduling! Hello, specialists! 

When you're done adding classes, it might end up looking a little something like this. Take a peek at the way I set mine up... I wanted a play-by-play of my entire day to make sub-planning as simple as possible. I run Daily 5 a little different than some - I do one reading group, then a 10 minute, whole group, mini-lesson. Planbook allows you to choose different colors for classes, so I assigned my reading groups colors, and all the purple lessons in between are the mini-lessons throughout the morning.

When you click on a lesson, there's lots of options. First of all, you can create a template to show up for certain classes. I like my math lessons to have EQ, activator, teach, and summarize. You can also link directly to standards for each lesson (it allows you to search for your state's standards, or common core), you can add homework, as well as notes on what you'll need or how it went. One of my favorite features is the "BUMP" option. If you have a snow day, which we've had 6 of, you can bump your lesson forward one day. This is where I went nuts. With hand writing lessons, it was a PAIN to move them forward a day. This makes that so easy. It also gives you the option to extend a lesson for multiple days.

My last favorite feature is the ability to save your lessons as a PDF and print them. Hello, sub plans! The hardest part of sub plans for me was typing out the schedule of the day. If you use planbook, it's already done and all you have to do is print it! Win win win.

Here's what my week looks like after editing all the lessons.

I could go on and on and on about how much I love this. I highly recommend you try it - the site gives you one month for free, and then it's seriously $12 per year... much cheaper than buying fancy plan books with your name on the cover. DID I MENTION THERE'S AN IPAD APP?! You can edit and view your entire week's lesson plans right on the iPad. It's pretty sweet. I just keep my iPad at my reading table throughout the morning and all my lessons are a finger swipe away!

I hope you give it a try! I swear it's cut my planning time in half!