Long Range Planning

I just wrapped up another school year and what am 

I doing this morning?

Long range planning for my next school year.  Probably doesn't make sense to many but, with school still fresh in my mind (and both of my children taken care of this week), it's the perfect time to reflect and put those thoughts into my plan for next year.  Over the course of 17 years, I've gone from day-to-day planning to week-to-week planning to quarter-by-quarter planning.  I make my own calendars in Word and then enlarge them on the copy machine.  Next year I'll be doing a 1/2 combo so either I'll have separate calendars for each grade or use different colors for each grade on the same calendar.

Yesterday I worked on math and trying to line up our math curriculum and the CCSS for each grade so we're doing the same thing(s) at the same time so I'm not always a split personality and can still do math in small groups.  I've done the best I can do I think. I screen shotted my units and plugged them into a document I created with Word.

The thing I love about this week is that I'm a gypsy....going from coffee shop to coffee shop to work.  Well as I had lunch yesterday at Kenny's (Chinese) Kitchen, I ripped my fortune in half...

Hmmmm, like Alanis Morrisette once said, "Isn't it ironic?  Doncha think?"  I'm reading this fortune as it doesn't apply to me because I've ripped it :-)

I love the app I used to make this simple photo collage!  It's called Photo Collage Maker and it's free!

Next up is reading planning: Houghton Mifflin and the CCSS.

Long Range Planning

It's August....that means I report back in about a week and a half.  I promised myself that I wouldn't work on any school stuff until the beginning of this month and I made good on my promise.  I had such a blast doing yard work and landscaping (we've been in our new house for a year already) and a month-long trip back home to Minnesota (with plenty of fun and $hopping) kept me happy and busy!

Collage by PicMonkey

So now it's time to "Make hay while the sun shines!" as my college cross country coach would always say.  I'm sitting down today and, for the first time in my teaching career, doing some long range planning to set myself up for success and hopefully reduce the amount of work I have to do later and the stress that comes with being back at work and not having enough time to do this because of school and district in-services.

I created the quarterly calendars with Microsoft Word and you can download them here.  They are in .doc format (not pdf) so you can tweak and change them to fit your needs.  Enjoy!