How do YOU plan: linky

SO funny I should stumble onto this linky party as I am making sure I have all my plans in order to meet with our new teacher tomorrow to go over some things with her. =)

So I am joining up with Mrs. Stanford's Class on this linky party on how you plan!

First of all, my school is departmentalized...however, I am self contained. Explanation: 1) I LOVE being self contained. I have done both ways and prefer having my own kiddos, all day...just me. 2.) we have an odd amount of classes (5) so someone's gotta do it, guess it'll have to be me! (sidebar: we will most likely hire another teacher and have 6 classes, however that teacher will be on the opposite end of the school in the 5th grade hall, stinky-- that's how I spent my first year, I feel their pain!)

Being self contained definitely has it's down sides too... My district began this past year having any and every kind of meeting you could imagine. We have PLC meetings (professional learning community) once a month for LA & Math. Then we have LA Mondays and Math Mondays once a month as well. (is it just me or are these meetings a complete waste of time 97% of the time????)  So there is a lot of --- "what did you think about this unit" or "how is your kids writing going"... chit chat.

THEN on top of those "district meetings". We plan as a grade level once a week- go over any important events coming up/discuss what the other departments are doing... math shares their curriculum with LA and vise versa so no one is in the dark. We also meet once a week as subject areas (yes... sometimes that means 3 meetings a week for me... errrrrrrrrr......) I am responsible to "head" our LA meetings, all in all I just facilitate and take notes for our principal. Years past, I will be honest-- subject area planning was not anything spectacular. This year we have a brand new teacher who I plan on mentoring in a sense, and helping her get the hang of kindergarten. I wasn't lucky enough to have an experience like that, so I hope she finds it helpful. In these meetings I hope that we go over COL (our online curriculum) expectations, what we are REALLY doing and integrating themes into curriculum. We also spend a great deal of time talking about our low babies and our tutoring time which is called tiger time. WE share struggles, ideas, etc.

ADDITION:::
Heres a preview of what my lesson plans look like. We have to submit our lesson plans on our campus drive to our principal. So I figured it was time to make the change from handwriting plans to typing on my computer. I am pretty happy with how the lay out turned out! = ) My plans are 2 pages, this is just the morning page, the afternoon is on it's own page. I keep my Guided Reading in an entirely different binder because I store my books in folders while theyre checked out (will blogg and share about that soon!) I am currently working on my personalized "teacher binder" which I will keep all my hard copy lesson plans in for the year.

Anyway, I am pretty excited to go and hop around other people on this linky to get ideas for our planning time. I think itll be great. :) If you haven't linked up--- get on it!