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Organization Binder :: Group Organizer & User Name/Password Sheet

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Lately, I’ve seen a huge amount of teacher organization binders on Pinterest and teacher blogs. Unfortunately, they aren’t meant to be used by most special education teachers, counselors, or social workers – they’re all organized for classroom teachers. So, over the course of the next few weeks, I’m making one for the rest of us 🙂 When it’s done in August, I’ll add it to my TpT Store, but until then, follow along and you can download them here for free!

My first page is for organizing groups: counseling groups, speech-language therapy groups, reading groups, any group! The second page contains a sheet to help you organize the thousands of user names and passwords our students tend to accumulate over the year! In the mean time, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments for pages you’d like to see!

Here are links to the warm-colored ones:

Group Organizer

User Names Warm

And the cool ones:

Group Organizer

User Names Cool

Enjoy!

Like the backgrounds? You can get them at my store here!

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New Product :: Striped Digital Backgrounds

Striped Background Cover

If you’ve been looking for a way to spice up some of your TeachersPayTeachers or homemade classroom activities, check out my new Striped Background Bundle!  It includes 66 different backgrounds in PNG format, so they can be scaled to fit any sized project. It also matches my Chevron Background Bundle so you can have consistency in your projects! And because you’re all awesome, loyal blog readers, you can get 3 of them for free!

Enjoy 🙂

Blue Lime Orange

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Review :: Erin Condren Life Planner 2013

life planner

Last year, I ordered my first Erin Condren Life Planner. I loved it so much that I convinced a few of my coworkers to get one too and wrote a review about it here as well. This year, I found out the new ones would be available on June 4th and started the countdown in my head to when I could order mine (my husband thought I was nuts).

I placed my order this morning, but here’s what I can say so far:

Loves:

  • Having a weekly “to do” list on the side of each week and daily “to do” lists below each day. Prior year’s planners had them on most pages, but were missing them for the first week of each month. This will definitely help my organization!

weekly to do daily to do

  • Ability to personalize rectangle stickers. In the past, I got a million “vegas” or “play” stickers, which I didn’t have a lot of use for. Now, I can personalize them for institute days, school improvement days, parent-teacher conferences, etc., which is awesome!

rectangle stickers

  • The classic cover choices. I was a little nervous when I started to see some of the new color options for this year, but was super relieved that many of my favorites from last year were still there! This is the one I ordered this year, with a list of my favorite things for the background and “2013-2014 School Year” for the title, of course:

cover

  • Continued durability that I loved from last year. Everything from the super laminated cover to the sturdy aluminum coil put up with all the abuse I put it through last school year. I was happy to see none of these things changed!

aluminum coil

My Wishes for Next Year:

  • More “circle sticker” choices. You can upload your own images, but I’d love if they had more pre-made images for holidays to choose from.

circle stickers

  • Cheaper notebooks for the back. I’m already forking out $50-$60 for a planner. I feel like it’s a little rough to charge an additional $18.50 for matching notebooks, even though they are super cute and personalized. Surely they could get the cost down a bit for those of us already buying a planner!

notebooks

  • Ability to personalize ALL the rectangle stickers. While it is faster (for me and probably for them too!) to have some of them with specific events already made up (sale!, no work!, doctor appt., party!, etc.), it’d really be nice to do ALL my own. That way, I can color code and not be stuck in the colors they’ve decided for certain types of events (light blue for fun things, red for work).

stickers

  • An improved pen holder. I still ordered one again for this year, but my one from last year started stretching out after only a month or so. I’d love some higher quality elastic for it.

pen holder

Even though I think there are a few improvements for future years, I am SUPER excited to get mine!! The bright colors and fun overall feel of the planner got me through last year! I ordered it today and the estimated ship date is June 14th, so I’ll post an update when it arrives in its adorable, bright-colored box 🙂

A final note: All of the pictures on this post are from the Erin Condren site. None of them are mine!

Update:

Here are some pictures of mine! I love it so much. It almost makes me feel ready for school!

Life Planner