the problem with planning

My planning paradise (is there a way to make a font sarcastic?)

Planning. It can take over a teacher's life sometimes. Sometimes it gets pushed to the back burner until the last minute. I like to plan in advance and allow myself free time over the weekends (or time to devote to grad school work), but this new year and these new mandates for materials to be used for instruction are killing me. I am not excited to lesson plan, because I do not have a lot of control over what I am planning, and therefore my creativity is kind of pushed to the side. Creativity makes teaching exciting. Being told to follow a teaching manual is not.

This week I have other problems interfering with lesson planning. Those problems are called graduate classes. Grad school started up this week and I have been left with afternoons cut too short, hours taken away from my evenings, and a whole pile of work added onto the already huge pile of work. Now it's Thursday afternoon and all that I have in front of me is an empty weekly planner (and a blog that is allowing me to be creative and a procrastinator). 

Granted, I haven't been procrastinating as much as it may appear on the surface, I have been putting some thought into my plans. Last weekend I was trying to figure out a new template, but stuck with the one I had initially designed. This week, I'm taking my template and trying to pare down what I need to put into it. Last week I plugged in as much of the content from my teacher's manuals as I could, this week I'm looking at what I was actually able to get to in the time that my school has allotted for me to teach different materials. This whole process is becoming one huge (and sometimes overwhelming) puzzle. But, I like puzzles, so I keep on plugging away.

This week's brainstorming has resulted in composing a lot of charts to break down my language arts time and to try and figure out how to really incorporate the daily five into my teaching. My planning is leading me toward doing a daily three so that I have enough time to cover the required content that I will be testing on each week, but so that students also have the time to explore literacy on their own and develop their skills at a pace that is appropriate for them. I have also been looking at all of the less important elements from my teacher's manual (that I plugged into last week's lesson plan, but did not use) and eliminating them from my actual plan, but having enough knowledge of them to fill in any gaps in the day should that ever happen (not likely unless a special has been cancelled). Math has gone pretty well, so I am not to concerned about making changes in that area.

The puzzle pieces are coming together in my mind, but it's time to get those ideas plugged into my template. Happy planning (and happy first week to some) to all of my teacher family and friends. We'll find a way to cram all of this information into our students' heads (hopefully)!