Designing My Own Teacher Planner

Basic photoshop skills + summer break + a weird obsession with planners = 

So I did it. I designed my very own teacher planner and gradebook. And I love it. And you can buy the downloadable pdfs for only $5 if you love it too!

How did this come about, you're thinking?

Well, I have been obsessed with planners since high school.

I have always loved examining the planners at Barnes & Noble or Target, flipping through the pages, measuring up the size, deciding on the perfect cover. Nothing feels more satisfying than looking at my life sprawled out in meticulous colorful handwriting on a few spiraled-together pages of paper. Nothing.

I even keep my planners from year's past so I can look back at my life and see all the events that were important enough for me to write down.

Now, being a self proclaimed advocate of using technology to make life easier, I have tried to move my calendar-of-life to my iPhone and Google Calendar. But something about it just won't stick. Perhaps it is the pain of scrolling through the options, clicking on each day and slowly typing in the details, or perhaps it is because I fail to check my phone or reference it in times of need, or perhaps it is the complete lack of satisfaction I feel afterward.

So I gave up on my attempt at transferring my planner love to the digital world.

Then it dawned on me! Why not design my own inserts for my own planner? A planner that had exactly what I needed with plenty of pages for grading and planning and no cheesy cover and no excessive resource pages and wouldn't cost me $100 (ahem, Erin Condren...). Yeah! I can do that...

...17 hours of photoshopping later...

I finally came up with this: a complete teacher planner and gradebook that just screams Ms. B in all its glory. Once I got going I got a little carried away and even made parent contact logs, checklists, calendars, attendance pages and an array of covers.

Here's a little peek .... (the cover shown below is obviously customized for me, but the downloadable version is blank)

Love it? Buy it and download it here!

I'm taking the .pdfs to FedEx to have them printed in color and bound in a notebook. I made myself a customized one, but also decided to make a generic one for anyone who may want to purchase this...

Which leads to my first debut on Teachers Pay Teachers, an awesome website where you can sell, buy and download tons of school resources made by other teachers. I've only begun to dabble with all it has to offer, which is very exciting. My next plan is to sell the template/layout I made for my Instagrammar Bulletin board (I'll blog about this very soon!)

I'd like to start putting more school worksheets and lessons I've designed up there but this project was quite an ambitious place to start...and summer is dwindling fast so I better get off my computer and enjoy the sunshine while I can.

Visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store if you want to buy the downloadable .pdfs of my planner!