Sunday, August 14, 2016

Back To School Supplies For The Teacher

© Kathy Duncan, 2016

This is not a quilt. Obviously. This Slow Stitching Sunday finds me getting ready for school, which starts in one week, so I am prepping a few things. No stitching happening today. 

Years ago, my district, like most, supplied us with lesson plan books. Then everything went digital - in theory. When all the lesson plan books in the warehouse were gone, my district liberated us to supply our own. Yikes! 

Since I did not want to give up a paper lesson plan book, I designed my own. First, I thought about what would be in my ideal lesson book and designed my own planning pages accordingly. Then I decided to add all things that   I'd like to have  at my fingertips. My lesson plan book includes an identification page so my book can be returned to me if I leave it some place, a district calendar, a bell schedule, tardy policy, planning pages, Cornell Note pages for note taking in meetings, and a cheat sheet for using our new online attendance and gradebook.

For the covers, I used an old album cover. The key was to look for one with great graphics. This one is Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson's album "Out in Our Meadow." I don't know anything about their music, but this cover makes me smile. We buy fabric because it makes us happy; lesson plan book books need to have the same element. I'll be living with it on a daily basis for a year, so it needs to have that feel good factor.

The front of the album cover:





 

The inside of the album cover:





I took a piece of paper and used it to block out the area that would become the cover and taped it down with blue painter's masking tape: 




Then I used my trusty quilter's ruler and an small utility knife to cut away the excess. This will be the front of the lesson plan book:




I repeated the process with the inside of the album cover:




This will be the back cover of the lesson plan book:






I took the two covers and the interior pages to my local office supply store, where they added clear, protective covers to the front and back before spiral binding it for me. The clear covers were 49 cents, and the spiral binding was $2.99.




And I'm good to go for another year!