My name is Denise. I would ♥️ to share with you my lesson plan organizers. I began my teaching career teaching special education. I was asked to write plans for 30+ students and write them in the traditional five day box lesson plan book. I don't have anything personal against planning this way if you are able to plan out exactly what you are going to teach on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday but for me that was not the reality. I started out putting each group/subject I was teaching starting with the first group until I had the day planned out. I had over six pages of plans for every week because of all the groups I taught. I was asked to turn these in each week and as I am sure you can relate, I was spending my weekends writing up lesson plans. I might even be okay with writing them if they actually worked for me but by Wed. most of my plans were not on the days I had planned them for. I tried to draw arrows, erase, etc., to indicate where I actually was on the plan. It was a complete mess and it did not really make it easy to follow. I did this for a few years and started to become very discouraged with the expectation of planning this way. I began several different approaches, which didn't work very well either.
I finally started to conceptualize the idea that I was spending too much time trying to figure out how long each activity would take rather than quality time thinking about what I wanted to teach. I realized that if I literally quit trying to determine what day I would be teaching specific activities on, I would be free to think globally about what I wanted to teach. I began thinking about the idea of planning in a sequential way (which is how we actually teach) and the floodgates opened up for me! It took several changes and attempts but I finally developed a format that worked for me. I put my lesson plan format into a three-ring binder and used tabs to divide each group I taught. My colleagues started noticing my planning system and loved the idea of planning in a sequential way without the confines of M-F boxes. I was encouraged to slightly tweak them to include the organization that would work for a regular classroom, a secondary classroom, and a specialist classroom. These variations include grades for some, a way for a secondary teacher to only write a lesson plan once but have the ability to track up to six periods, a format for the teacher wanting lots of room to write and make additions /changes and a space for the special education or intervention teacher to have an independent practice section. I copyrighted and sold these books by printing them at a local print shop each time a teacher purchased one.
I decided two years ago to design and create them in a beautiful soft-bound format with two fun covers. I built my ecommerce store, found a company to self-publish with and The Anders Lesson Organizers store was born! I am just beginning my journey of selling online but these organizers are tested by teachers for teachers and are backed with lots of love, sweat and tears. Teachers are the most creative people I know and I would love it if you would put your creative spin on planning by using one of the Anders Lesson Organizers.
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