What is your biggest weakness?

I can say with 100% certainty that organization is my biggest weakness.  My creativity, bizareness, and free spiritedness have a tendency to contribute to little clusters of messes around my room (both in the classroom and at home).  Then I can't find something or I forget something.  It's the worst sometimes!  I have a multitude of goals for this year, but my primary one is to keep myself organized!! Well, I took the first step in this journey to organizing my crazy and got myself an AMAZING planner.

   

This planner is an Erin Condren.  It was a little pricey, but what I've definitely learned in life is that you get what you pay for!  And this planner definitely gives you a bang for your buck! First of all, as you can see they're adorable!! They have SO many different designs, this just happened to be the one I chose since blue is my favorite color, and I LOVE the quote on the front!  But, I definitely didn't get the planner just because it was cute!  It is extremely practical and has some AMAZING features specifically for teachers! 

First of all, aesthetically there are so many components that aren't only cute but are functional also.  The front cover has a space for your name and any other information you'd like to contribute.  What I don't have pictured is right after that cover page, there are two pages that have sections for: personal information, access codes and usernames, web resources, classroom volunteers, special events, and helpful hints for the substitute.  At the back there is a two pocket folder for where you can add any paperwork you might need to.  All throughout the planner there are little inspirational quotes at any natural page break.  The one I pictured says, "The art of teaching is to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."  Finally, both the front and back cover are laminated so you can use dry erase markers for making easily editable to do lists and what not.  

Before we even get to the monthly calendar, there are a few more features you'll find that are extremely useful!  There is a section with holidays and dates to remember.  I loved this part because it doesn't just do generic holidays, it also includes dates like authors birthdays.  I thought this would be great for lesson planning and planning a day in dedication to different authors and important people.  It also has a space to keep track of absences.  I think this will be great in easily catching the repeat offenders.  I know my district's website is a little confusing to navigate in regards to absences, so this will be easy to just look at or pull out during a parent meeting.  There is also a space for graphing information, and we as teachers ALL know how important tracking data and information is!  The final section before we hit the calendars is the a space to keep track of long range plans.  I like the idea of having a space that has the general long range plans in and I plan on pinning a copy of my details plans right behind it.  

Finally we get to the calendar.  I love that with Erin Condren, you can choose what month to start your planner with.  I chose August because that is when school starts for me, but you can choose any month you please and they will give you 12 months, starting from there!  After the 12 months, there is a section for daily lessons.  I'm not the type of person to read my detailed lesson plans as I teach throughout the day.  Rather, I like to write up a general outline of activities-a skeleton of lesson-so to speak and go from there. This will be extremely helpful with this since before I would just write it on a piece of paper every morning and end up with papers every where or losing my skeleton outline throughout the day.  Like this I can pre-enter every skeleton over the weekend and have it all in one place that will be hard to lose!  Finally, we come to my FAVORITE feature: THE STUDENT CHECKLIST.  This could just be me being a dork, but I love this feature because I think it'll make inputting grades SO much quicker.  Like this I'll be able to just go down the list, and plug in grades on the computer rather than have to find each students assignment and then their name and then type in the grade.  This will definitely cut some steps and save some time.  

Overall, I'm extremely happy with this planner and definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good planner that allows for great organization.  Hopefully this keeps me organized and helps me organize the rest of my classroom (and life haha)!  What is your biggest weakness?  What is your step 1 in improving yourself?  Reflection is key in our job!  Never forget that!