How I Use and Customize My Well Planned Day Lesson Planner

My Well Planned Day arrived yesterday! I’m so excited. After many attempts at trying many different methods,…a couple of years ago I finally resigned myself to the fact that I am just a ‘paper and pen’ kind of person. (I already knew that, I was just fighting it. ) I’m also not going to be diligent enough to create my own, nor will I be happy printing one off in black and white (because lets face it, I like color.) This will be my 3rd year using a Well Planned Day planner and, for all these reasons and more, I’m excited to dig in and start using this year’s planner.

Immediately after it arrived, I unwrapped it and flipped through it, taking in the sight of the fresh, blank papers just waiting to be filled in, inhaling the scent of “new” and feeling the smoothness of the unmarred pages. A new planner is like a new beginning, a fresh start. I love it.

Can you guess how long that lasted, how long it took before I sat down with a smooth ink pen and began adding my mark to the unmarked pages? (About five minutes. Maybe.) Learning from last year, I set about the process of customizing my Well Planned Day planner to make it even better.

The first step is choosing the start and stop dates for the year and scheduling the breaks.

Moving from there, I set about transferring that info to each monthly calendar, numbering the weeks and marking the breaks.

And from there I move on to the individual weeks, labeling each week up the left-hand side of the page – which makes it easy to flip through and find a week, but also helps me see which week we’re in while looking at a weekly spread.

The last step in customizing my Well Planned Day is adding four colored paper clips that function as “tabs” for quick and easy page-finding. One paper clip stays on the full year calendar at the front, also serving to section off the curriculum and schedule pages before it. The 2nd paperclip marks the current month and the 3rd paperclip marks the current week– these change as the calendar changes. The 4th paperclip marks the Semester One records page for recording grades and attendance– it will later move to the Semester Two page. Tabbing these helps me find the pages I need quickly, and reminds me to use all the functions of the planner.

NOW my planner is ready for use. =)

As my curriculum arrives piece by piece, I can fill in the lesson plans and get ready for the new year. I love that part.