Here at TPTC, we pride ourselves on creating planners for teachers and school staff. As former teachers ourselves, we know the struggle of trying to find the right planner – it’s even tricky for us, as there are so many different kinds of teachers and roles in schools! That’s why we created the Undated Teacher Planner, which is the same as our full Teacher Planner but without any dates. The weekly pages are completely blank, without even the days of the week printed. This means it’s super flexible for all kinds of different people, and we think it works really well for EYFS teachers who like to plan by provision. Let’s take a look at our example planner which shows a week of planning for an EYFS class.
Changing the layout
Our Teacher Planner usually has the days with dates along the top, so there’s one column per day. Since our Undated Planner doesn’t have these labelled, you can arrange it however you like! Here, the teacher has used a different column for each area of provision, and put the days of the week down the side. Planning often looks different in EYFS, and it may be less important to have a full timetabled plan for each day. This method means that there’s more of an overview of what’s going on in the classroom this week, but still allows for any daily tasks or events.
Different kinds of plans
Each column has different boxes, but aren’t labelled with times, which means you can use them however you like. This teacher has used her weekly spread in the Undated Planner to plan both what areas will look like in terms of resources, as well as specific tasks, and these are colour coded. When there is a specific adult-led task, this is popped in the right place to show which day of the week this will be happening, and colour coded with green. Other boxes can be used flexibly without being specific about the day of the week, and show a more general plan for what the area will have going on throughout the whole week.
A semi-structured week
We love this layout as it functions as both a plan and a To Do list that works for looking at a whole week at a time. The general plan for each area creates a built in to do list for the week, as the teacher knows she’ll need to add or change certain areas. Having the days of the week labelled means they can be referred to when necessary, so she put ‘add in the books children have made’ to the outdoor provision on Friday, as she knows that’s when they will have made the books. This means she has a really flexible schedule that can refer to days of the week when it needs to, but can ignore them when it’s not so relevant.
Creating new areas
You can see this teacher has used our lovely Candied Petals washi tape to separate off the bottom section of the pages. Many teachers use washi tape to create areas or mark things in their planners – we often see washi tape across the middle of the page to separate the morning and afternoon. This teacher has created a new section at the bottom of her pages to make notes about areas that will stay the same throughout the week. You can see her sand tray and water tray will be staying the same this week, so she doesn’t need to give this much space on the page, whereas her maths area will change and adapt through the week, and she wants to be able to note this.
A weekly dashboard
The right hand side of the page has a Notes and a To Do section, and with the EYFS provision plan, they act as a dashboard for the whole week. The EYFS teacher has noted down the theme for the week, as well as an important day, and we can see these tie in with the rest of her planning. She can also use the To Do list to add any other tasks she’ll need to do that week, that haven’t already come up as she’s written in her plans. This is a good place to pop admin tasks, and make more detailed resource lists so you can make sure you have everything you need for your EYFS class.
We always love to see the different ways our customers use our teacher planners, but if you’ve been unsure if a Teacher Planner would work for you, take a look at our Undated Planner. It has all of the same content as the full Teacher Planner, including lots of curriculum planning pages for the whole year. To see what’s inside, have a look at the video below.
