Lesson Plan Series {The Planning Calendar}

Is the end of the year a crazy time or what?!  I did not forget about wrapping up this series...I just got caught up in the craziness!  If you've missed any previous posts, you can find them below.

All Posts in This Series:

Introduction

Starting with the Standards

Creating Long Range Plans

Writing Unit Plans

Differentiating Unit Plans 

Organizing Your Units
The Planning Calendar 

Once I have my long range plans and units developed, I create a Planning Calendar.  This is like my teaching bible, y'all!  It goes everywhere with me.  I write on it daily.  It is my everything at school. :)

Here's a pic of it in action.   It sits in the very front of my lesson plan binder.  It gives me a glimpse at what units I'm currently teaching (or are coming up next) as well as important dates/events.

You can see that I cross the day off each morning. :)  I created this (years ago) in Microsoft Word.  It's just a table that I merge and fill for my needs.  I begin with our district's calendar and add all of the important dates (such as teacher workdays, report cards, holidays, etc).  Then, I add in other holidays that might be of importance at school and things like daylight savings times...which are important to me.

Then, I add in birthdays for my team members and hall duty (HD) assignments for us.  Once all of these are added, I add in my units of teaching to correlate with the key at the bottom.  This just makes it a really handy, at-a-glance document.

I also add in a flexible "read-aloud" schedule in the top section.  This is totally flexible, but I like to have my read-alouds mapped out for the school year.  I have a small block set aside for read-aloud daily (usually after lunch or recess).  During this time, I'm either reading a chapter book aloud or books by a particular author (and we look for his/her "fingerprints").

 You can download my entire PLANNING CALENDAR HERE.

If you'd like to try to map out your school year with a planning calendar, you can download the Microsoft Word template that I begin with HERE.

I hope this helps as you begin to plan for the new school year!  Happy Planning! :)

UPDATE:  For future templates, starting with the 2016 school year, simply search for the year in the search bar on my blog.