Tag: Tips & Tricks

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Tips & Tricks :: Make-Your-Own Customized Planner Stickers

Custom Erin Condren Stickers

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been working on getting my Erin Condren Life Planner set up for when school starts. I ended up ordering the sticker book they sell, but found that I still wanted more stickers to decorate with. I googled around a bunch and realized there really isn’t a good way to order your own stickers without buying them in packs of 500. I did find some on Etsy that would work, but I kept thinking, “If all these other people can do it, why can’t I???” That’s when I came across this YouTube video for how one person decorated her planner and it contained one of these wonderful sticker makers.

Suddenly, I figured it out! I have millions of pounds of scrapbooking background paper sitting upstairs that I haven’t touched since my daughter was born and I know I could quickly put it to good use by running it through a sticker maker and cutting it to the right size to fit my planner. Not only that, I could have my students make their own stickers, use it to create name tags, labels for my classroom, and a million other things too! How did I not know these things existed!? Of course, I immediately went out and bought one.

Custom Erin Condren StickersI ended up getting a slightly bigger version of the sticker maker in the YouTube video, a Xyron 5″ one instead of the 2.5″ one. They also make 9″ combination sticker or magnet maker too if you’re REALLY hard core! None of the machines need electricity or heat. You just stick the thing in you want to make into a sticker, turn the crank, and you’re done. I’d venture to say it’s just as easy as the laminator I use.

Back to the planner goodies. Here’s what I did to make my own custom stickers to fit my Erin Condren Life Planner!

– Make a template to fit each section of the planner. Fortunately for you, the most time-consuming part is already done 🙂 Just download and use what I made, here! It’s in Powerpoint format, and set up to fit vertical Erin Condren Life Planners, but you could easily resize for other planners and customize with your own fonts, images, and text size!

– Print the stickers onto colorful paper. I used a bunch of sheets from this pack because it seemed like most of the colors already matched the colors in the planner.

Erin Condren Stickers

Erin Condren Stickers

– Cut the stickers into strips to fit through your sticker maker. Since I have a 5″, I chose not to use the middle column of stickers on the template so that I could divide my 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper into 2 strips that were 4.25″ x 11″ long to feed through.

Erin Condren Stickers

Erin Condren Stickers

– Run through your sticker maker and cut apart with scissors or a paper cutter.

Erin Condren Stickers

And you’re done! The template I made contains stickers for the weeks, months, headings, and notes sections, so you can easily make your own to fit any section of the planner!

Erin Condren Stickers

I’m definitely thinking of making a bunch of these for one of my friends for her birthday. Do you have any good classroom uses for a sticker maker!? I’m dying to try out some new things with it!

 

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How I Use My Erin Condren Life Planner

How I Use My Erin Condren Life Planner

After my last post about the new 2015-2016 Erin Condren Life Planners, a few of you have been asking me to share how I use it for school social work/counseling purposes. This is for you!

On a side note, I’ve often thought about getting a Teacher Lesson Planner, but just felt there were a lot of pages I wouldn’t use so I just use my Special Ed Binder for planning instead. I’d love to hear your experiences with it if you’ve used the Teacher Lesson Planner.

Now, some of you are probably wondering, “It’s only June, why the heck is she already filling that thing out!?” Really, it’s a good questions. The easy answer is that I clearly have a problem. There’s no other reason! A special note before I go on, all names in the following pictures are fictitious and added in Photoshop. These are not my actual students, but this IS what my planner looks like when I use it!

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Here’s my cover (with my family picture covered). I love this design!IMG_9045e

The inside page has a cool velum overlay that I really really like! I don’t know that you can really see it in this picture, but it adds a nice classy touch to the beginning.

IMG_9049All right, as I mentioned before, my only real complaint about the Life Planner is the lack of a July-July version. You can either get January-December 2016 or pay $5 and add the remaining months of 2015. I find this whole thing weird since they’re launching in June (don’t you think most people would need July-July!?) So the first thing I always do is remove August-December 2016. I could just leave it all in, but when I’m carrying my laptop, several binders, and my planner to most meetings, I’d prefer to not have the extra weight. This picture makes me want to cry though…IMG_9038

One of the new aspects of this year’s planner is the addition of this page spread. It’s supposed to be for adding monthly goals, or family member tasks, or other things. However, since my life during the school year always seems to revolve around special education evaluations, I use it to keep track of my caseload reeval dates! The month of May really needs to happen less than once per year…sigh. Anyone feel my pain?

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I don’t tend to do a lot with the monthly pages. Generally, I have way too much going on each day to fit into the little box. Instead, I order the custom stickers and use them to give me more of a “month at a glance” view. I love that I can have them say whatever I want.

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A bunch of blank ones and random events come with the planners though if you’d rather save a little money and handwrite your own. Here’s a picture of those:

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I also get the circle stickers and put my family members’ faces on them for birthdays, or fun pictures for holidays. You can see the ones I used for Halloween and the start of 2nd quarter below!
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My weekly pages definitely get the most attention from me. I use the lefthand column as a to do list. I find this helps me deal with the mass amounts of stress that happen when I try to remember everything I need to do in a given week! I use a fairly standard (x = complete, -> = move to next week, cross off the item = no longer needed). Then, I use the boxed divisions each day to separate work tasks into morning (about 8-11 am), afternoon (about 12-2), and evening (about 3-7). They used to be labeled morning, afternoon, and evening, but they’re blank this year and I won’t be spending the time writing in titles! I use the space under each day for after-school personal activities. I suppose I could put some evening events in the last box for the day, but I like having them separate from the work tasks in the box. My color coding system is as follows:

pink = RtI meetings
blue = special education meetings
green = other work-related meetings/appointments
orange = school tasks (not meetings) and all day school events
yellow = personal activities

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Another new feature this year is an additional sticker book. I like most of the stickers a lot and spaced them out throughout my weeks on weekends or places I don’t anticipating writing anything. A few of the stickers were more “gift tag” type labels, so they’re still in the book. Maybe I’ll save them for Christmas? I wish they’d have all been planner-y, but I’m still glad I got it!
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I’m completely in love with my planner again this year. It doesn’t make me wish it were August, but it certainly makes starting the school year a bit easier!
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How do you use your Erin Condren Life Planner?

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Tips & Tricks :: Daily Check-Out Questions

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Each year, I address the needs of some of the students on my caseload through a check-in, check-out program. I’ll probably write more about it another time, but the jist is that my students have a behavior chart that their teacher fills out during the day. When school first starts, I talk with the student for a few minutes about how their night was, how their day is starting off, and remind them of a few behavioral expectations to keep in mind during the day. We also sometimes role play briefly through a situations they have been struggling with. Then, at the end of the day, they earn reward dollars based on the points they earn, which they can redeem for a variety of prizes or activities.

It seems to work really well or the most part, but a lot of times, I notice myself asking my students the same exact questions at the end of every day. What was one good thing you did today? What is one thing you want to work on for tomorrow? Blah blah blah. And while those aren’t necessarily bad questions, I sometimes feel like they just become background noise to my kids and that I might come across as not really being interested in how their day actually was.

So, this past week I made the effort to NOT ask my typical questions. I still wanted to focus on their behavior and how it played into their day, but wanted them to put themselves into other peoples’ shoes a bit too. Here are a few that I came up with:

– If you had today to do over again, what would you do differently? What would you do exactly the same?

– On a scale from 1 (really sad) to 10 (super happy), how happy were you with how your day went today?

– If you were the teacher, what would you say or do to a student who did the things that you did today?

– How did you feel during ________ (subject) today? How did your behavior cause your teacher to feel? How does your behavior causes the other students in your class to feel?

– What was the hardest thing about your day today? What was the easiest?

– What is one thing you’ll always remember from today?

As I was trying to come up with new questions, I was reminded of a blog post I read a few years ago about asking your own kids how their day was at school. I loved how the questions were a bit unexpected and required the child to think, without feeling like they have to replay each and every moment of their day.

What questions do you ask your check-out students or own kids?