2019-2020 Erin Condren Teacher Planner
You can find the NEW 2020-2021 Erin Condren Teacher Planner Review & Walkthrough HERE
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The new Erin Condren Teacher Planner is here! It is something that I honestly look forward to every year. This will be my 5th year using the Erin Condren Teacher Planner as a homeschool planner. I have tried a lot of homeschool planners over the years, but I keep coming back to this one. The quality, the functionality for my needs. It is partially customizable, and the parts that are teacher specific can easily be repurposed for homeschoolers. I want to thank the lovely people over at Erin Condren for providing me with the new Teacher Planner to review!
This planner offers just enough structure for what I need while giving me the freedom to be creative as well. It doesn’t hurt that this is the most beautiful planner to work in! Thank you so much to Tori and the people over at Erin Condren for providing me with this planner to share with you all today! As always, all opinions are my own. If you haven’t signed up for an Erin Condren account before, you can do so here and get $10 off your first order!
Customization
Each Erin Condren Teacher Planner comes with several customization options. First, you get to choose your cover. You can choose whether or not you would like to personalize the cover with your name, or a quote. I tend to just have my first name put on all of my covers. Although in the past I have also gotten quotes or Bible verses. Whatever you would like to put there, you can! There are so many beautiful covers to choose from, and they are all interchangeable. That means that you can switch out your covers with other ones if you want. This year I chose the colorful kaleidoscope cover – which is the same cover that I got for my life planner.
Yes, I use more than one planner. My Erin Condren Teacher Planner is only for homeschool and kid-related activities.
After you choose your cover, you can then choose your coil color. There are four options. Rose gold, gold, matte black, and platinum. I have gotten the rose gold coil ever since they started allowing that customization.
Finally, you are able to choose from four different calendar start options.
- July 2019-June 2020
- August 2019-July 2020
- September 2019-August 2020
- January 2020-December 2020
In Maine, the school year calendar runs from July-June, so I love that I can have a July start date. We homeschool year round, and I like to have our entire year all in one planner. It makes it easier for me when I put together our homeschool portfolios.
Opening the Erin Condren Teacher Planner
When you open up the Erin Condren Teacher Planner you have a lined dashboard that you can use these wet erase markers on. There are a few functional pages before we get into the meat of the planner. First up is the All About Me page. There is space for classroom resources as well as websites and passwords. You could easily use this as a place to mark websites and other resources that you will be using throughout the year. Then next to it is the events and volunteers page. Unfortunately, I don’t have any volunteers coming in to help me with my homeschool – but this is a great place to track field trips.
The next spread is the Communication Log. Since this isn’t applicable to homeschoolers, I use it as a reading log for my two older kids. I will use a few stickers and washi tape to cover up what doesn’t work for us and repurpose it into what does.
Yearly Planning
Then you will move into the year-at-a-glance where it has July 2019-December 2020. This is a perfect place to use the colorful circles stickers. Last year I started to color code not only pen colors but also using these little circle stickers so I could easily see what our year looked like.
The next section is one that I love. It has each month of the year listed in a box. This is where I like to plan out themes, write down important dates or vacation time. It is big picture planning at its finest. The only thing that I don’t like about this section is that it starts with January instead of July. But, that is easily changed by stickers. I love that the Erin Condren Teacher Planner is so easy to adapt. I don’t have to rip huge sections out of the planner, instead, I can make a couple of tweaks and it is perfect for homeschooling.
The final section is a couple of spreads of graph paper and a spread of lined paper.
Erin Condren Teacher Planner: Months
Each month in the Erin Condren Teacher Planner starts with one spread that has both lined pages and a place where you can record special dates. This is great for pre-planning your month. If there are supplies that you need or books that you want to check out from the library, you can easily list that here. In the important dates section, you can put holidays that you observe, as well as birthdays, important appointments that the kids have that will interrupt your homeschool day etc.
Then you move into the monthly spread. I love that the Erin Condren Teacher Planner is 8 1/2 by 11 – you can fit a lot in each of the boxes. There is a column on the side for any list you may need to make as well as a mini monthly calendar that shows the next month at the bottom of that notes column.
On the monthly spread, I put anything that pertains to the kids. This includes doctor’s appointments, kids’ activities, extracurriculars, field trips etc. It is an extra step to do this, but I like to have all of the information pertaining to the kids in one place. It helps me to have a full understanding of everything they have done throughout the year. I also use this space to track which days we have done school. At the end of the month, I will write the number of days that we have done school and the running total for the year.
After the weekly planning pages for the month, there is an additional spread of lined paper. Perfect for notes, or goal planning, or whatever you need extra pages for.
Weekly Planning Pages
One of the best changes to the Erin Condren Teacher Planner last year, was changing the structure of the planner. Instead of having 40 weeks of undated planning pages at the end of all 12 months, they dated the pages. Then they put them after each month. So after your monthly spread, you have the weekly planning pages dated for the entire month right after the month itself. It looks more like a life planner this way. It also gave us extra planning pages, which is great for people like me who school year round. There are weeks where we only school a few days, or not at all, and other weeks are jam-packed. Having all of the weeks of the year available to write in made it easier for my brain to process the school year.
Each of the weeks has the days down the left side column. This is more of a horizontal view of the week. Along the top there are 6 blank columns where you can label them however you want. The seventh column is a notes column, or it could easily be made into a 7th column for a subject/period if you plan that way.
I label the first three columns with my kids’ names since I have three. Then each of the following three columns are subjects that we work on together. Then each day I write down what each child needs to do individually as well as what we are working on together, as a family. This type of planning worked really well for me last year. I can see myself in the future using two columns for each of my three children.
The End of the Planner
The Erin Condren Teacher Planner offers a couple of other customization options. The first is the number of checklist pages that you want. It comes with 7, but you can add up to 20 checklist pages. I have used these as trackers for my kids. I will write out all of the things I would like to track – this includes all of the subjects, plus a place to check if we went on field trips, chores, character etc. Whatever I want to track for the month. Then on the left, I will write each day of the month down the side. Then each day I can check off whichever subjects we have done if the kids are doing their chores if we went on field trips etc. At the end of the month, I am easily able to look at the entire month, see what we have done, see where we have slacked off, and make adjustments for the following month.
The last customization to the Erin Condren Teacher Planner is the number of clear sleeves that you add. It comes with one, but you can add two more. These clear sleeves are at the very end of the planner. I got three this year so that I can have one for each child. They are nice and thick, and it is great to have a place to slide some important paperwork into. I like to keep the originals of what I need to send into our state notifying them of our homeschool status. Then it is always available and with the rest of my homeschool paperwork.
All the Stickers!
After the checklist pages, there are 4 pages of stickers. Some of these stickers have nothing to do with homeschooling, so I don’t use them. But, there are some cute stickers that I will put throughout my planner sometimes. The blank label stickers are especially useful. The next part is the folder, which has been updated this year (and also updated in the life planner) to a full pocket on both the front and the back. This makes it actually useable with large sheets of paper.
One new addition this year was three pages of holiday stickers. The holidays are no longer printed directly in the Erin Condren Teacher Planner. Instead, you can pick and choose which holidays you want to put in the calendar based on which ones you actually observe. This is a nice touch because we don’t all celebrate the same holidays.
The Bottom Line
I love the Erin Condren Teacher Planner. It has just the right amount of structure for me, and as I have said, it is easy to adapt for homeschooling. The paper quality is amazing, and this planner holds up to a lot of moving around. This planner comes out with me regularly when I am bringing my kids to other activities, or if I am going somewhere to plan out anything. I love that it is coiled instead of in a binder because then I am able to fold it in on itself. It doesn’t need to just sit on my desk.
Do you use an Erin Condren Teacher Planner for your homeschool planning? Don’t forget to enter to win a $75 Erin Condren gift card so that you can get your own Erin Condren Teacher Planner for the new homeschool year!
