Working Smarter, Not Harder

Planning, planning, planning

How do you do lesson plans? 

Erin Condren planner? Handwritten plans? Typed documents? School provided calendar planner? Full format District mandated plans? Planning binders? Online sites? 

Do you work with your team to plan or are you solo? 

This will be my 5th year teaching and I finally found a way that works for me, my team, and that also benefits my students.

I created my Long Range Plans a few years ago for myself and my team as a result of us trying to learn a then new math program, Engage NY or Eureka Math, and implement the Journeys Reading Program. We struggled to visual SEE how things played out just by using the provided curriculum guides and the district pacing maps. 

 <<< WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER!>>> 

We then got to work! Our district gives us credit for a Professional Development day to plan with our PLC, or professional learning community, which includes my 3 teammates. So each year we spend a day (or more) working together on these plans. We chose to focus on one subject at a time and used district and curriculum guides to plan out what was best instruction for our students. Below is the REAL guide we are planning to use and implement this coming year. You'll notice we still use Journeys for reading and Engage NY for math. We do jump around a bit in math because of our district assessments, BUT we also found that some concepts were better placed before/after others for our students needs. 

((Disclaimer: we were given permission to skip around and meet students needs))

Once we have the year at a glance mapped out we start planning out our weeks. We use the district and school calendars to align our days, note when events occur at school etc. My team and I have been working together for 4 years now and I truly believe we are the dream team! They are such amazing teachers and we all work so well together, making this process easier and easier each year.
Each subject is color coded throughout the year. For example, our 2nd grade Journeys books are orange, hence the plans for reading show up as orange. Little things like that make my teacher heart happy. :)
If you'd like to see more and try out these plans for yourself click here

Now, once the year is mapped out and all the weeks are filled in on the Long Range Plans we then use https://www.planbook.com to do weekly planning. This online plabbook is $12 for the whole year! We have each taken turns paying for the years subscription and all have access to it from our computers, phones, and iPads thanks to the easy to use app!
((no this is not a paid post for planbook, just sharing my love for it!))

Once you log in and create an account you are able to do SO MANY different things! Change colors of blocks, fonts, times, classes, it adds a Day counter at the top, so if you're like me you track days to celebrate the 100th day of school! (shown in photo below)

Some of my favorite features are that you can see different views, that being daily and just seeing todays lessons, weekly, monthly and more. I also love that you can "bump" or "extend" lessons and it will shift your plans for you. We all know there are days that you just don't get to do everything you have planned.. so we "bump" it and move on!  Also I LOVE that you can attach resources to the plans (shown below at the bottom). This is so helpful when we all have a document we need to share or show to students. Instead of emailing and all downloading, we just attach to the plans and can pull it up quickly! 

Another favorite feature is that you can add in Common Core Standards! This is so helpful when planning and pacing because we can easily see what standards we have taught already. This is also helpful when we share plans with administrators and within our PLC's to note whats working, what needs to be tweaked etc. You can change the view of the standards to say the entire worded version of each standard, or just the number and abbreviation like we chose to use below.

I also love to print out the weekly spread and attach to my clipboard that I carry daily to keep myself on track. I also have the planbook.com app on my phone and school iPad when needed. This feature also makes it very easy to plan and share information with student teachers as well! 

Because I have used planbook.com for almost 5 years (I was so lucky to stumble on it half way through my first year teaching) that MY FAVORITE FEATURE is how you can transfer plans from one year to the next! IT IS SUCH A TIME SAVER! Most of the past few years our first few days/first weeks in Second grade have stayed the same. So its easy enough to push a button and transfer all of our plans from 2013-14, 2015-16, 2016-17 or parts of each etc. to this years spread without having to retype anything, reattach documents, and more! 

It may seem redundant to have both the long range plans and planbook.com but we all utilize both documents and its what works for us! Together as a PLC we meet once a week to easily pull copies, talk about whats worked so far, and get ready for the following week- all without having to sit and write lesson plans for the upcoming week without knowing what comes next. If you'd like to read more about our day and how all this planning works in my room click here for a day in 2nd grade