Let the Planning Begin!

I am very techy and I haven't carried a planner in years. For years, I carried a thick planner with everything under the sun in it. Then I met the Palm Pilot and fell in love and even convinced my non-tech mom to carry one. It had all my contacts, calendars and needlework inventory in it.

Unfortunately, smartphones/laptops took over and Palm Pilots were out marketed by Blackberry. My first smartphone was a BB and luckily I could transfer everything over and from there my planners were permanent history.

This works really well for my real life but it doesn't really seem to work for my teaching. Last summer I saw these cool personalized planners, but I'm really frugal and just wouldn't purchase one. I thought about making my own and in some ways I did. I pulled my attendance book apart and my lesson planner, three hole punched them and made an organizing binder.  

I'm really horrible about not putting things in my planner. I tend to pull things for the week and have them stacked on my desk or in my classroom closet (really a converted office). This summer I kept following even more middle school bloggers. Miss Math Dork blogged about making her own planner and I was ready to follow her lead. Then something awesome happened, she put her hard work to great use and offered her planner on TPT store, totally personalized!

It took several weeks before I decided to have her plan one for me. But I really couldn't resist. She was wonderful to work with, I picked out colors and fonts and in just a little while, my planner was ready for me to have it printed. She even included a link to a coupon site for the printing. :)

Printing was easy. I uploaded my file to Office Max and made decisions on binding, paper and printing styles. My local store was really quick. I received an email in hours telling me it was ready for pick up. Unfortunately, they made a mistake and printed it one sided and on the wrong paper weight. So while I had lunch and did the grocery shopping they reprinted my planner.

It turned out to be a happy mistake, they discounted the cost and gave me the extra planner for free! I hate to see things go to waste, so at the moment, I'm uncoiling the binding to pull the pages apart. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them but I am seeing the months added to my bulletin board. :)
   
Please excuse the picture layout, blogger isn't friendly tonight. If you like the planner, check out http://www.missmathdork.com/ you won't be sorry.