If your lessons are going well this year, you should reuse them next year!
Because it'll be waaaaay easier.
If you save your files digitally, here are some tips to make sure your desktop isn't a dumpster fire and next year can be suuuuuper easy with lesson planning.
This organization plan is basically two steps:
1. make a monthly calendar in Word with each day's teaching topic
2. save every document by the date, topic, and what type of resource
How to make a monthly calendar in Word
I use the calendar to plan topics. You could modify this step if you have a different system, but the calendar will make it easy next year to find resource topics you're looking to re-use.
Like when you vaguely remember you had a great activity on tener idioms and you want to use it again, you can pull up the calendar and see what date you taught that topic.
How to make a calendar in Word
1. Open Microsoft Word.
2. Choose "Calendar" instead of "Blank Document."
3. Click to enable macros. It'll prompt you to choose a date and year. Save that calendar.
4. Click the "Calendar" tab at the top and make the next month's calendar. Save all 10 (teaching) months of the year.
5. Open the calendar for the first month of the school year and fill in the topics you will teach (or taught) this school year.
It's editable, so you can always change things as your plans change. You just want it to be correct once you've finished teaching each day or each week, so next year you can easily find resources.
Google Docs would work just as well if you prefer having all resources in Google, but you'll have to make a table to make the calendar. It doesn't do the numbering work for you.
How to organize all documents
I suggest saving every document by the date, so that all resources for the same day are grouped together, and so all resources are chronological.
It will be easy next year to find resources that you want to reuse.
For example, if I'm teaching a lesson on the alphabet on September 8 and that lesson has a:
- lesson plan
- bell work
- powerpoint
- vocab page
- classwork
- listening script
- exit ticket
- 9.8.25 alphabet LP
- 9.8.25 alphabet Bell
- 9.8.25 alphabet Ppt
- 9.8.25 alphabet Vocab
- 9.8.25 alphabet CW
- 9.8.25 alphabet LS
- 9.8.25 alphabet ET
I use shorthand abbreviations like LP, CW, ET, etc so that I can see each document's name in the Finder (on Mac) or My Computer (on PC). Use abbreviations that make sense to you!
Once September is over, I'll put all of September's resources in a folder, so that they're not cluttering up all my digital files.
Got some tips for organizing digital files? Share them in the comments!
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