Filofax as a teacher planner

Every year since the beginning of my teaching career I have had a teacher planner. I think I started with an A4 one in a folder, then downsized to an A5 spiral bound one. I love my A5 spiral bound, but I do find I end up with a lot of loose papers tucked in it, and then they fall out and I shove them back in the wrong place. It can get a bit messy.

I decided I waned to stay A5 size but actually be able to reorganise the planner and have those loose bits of paper secured. Introducing my new A5 pink apex filofax.

I bought it from the filofax website for £28 along with a portable A5 hole punch which was about £10.

Be warned, the portable hole punch was the biggest waste of £10. The following shows what it did to a single page...

Anyway, in the meantime at school we were asked what teacher planners we wanted for next year, so I asked for the A5 loose pages. Unfortunately these come ready punched with two holes, which are not in a great place for the filofax's 6 holes. (The two holes overlap with the 6 which looks a bit messy).

Speaking of hole punches, I have ordered a universal hole punch from Amazon which is being shipped from Japan. Hopefully it will arrive around the end of June.

Anyway back to the filofax. Mine came with a 2013 and 2014 calendar. I binned the '13 one and sold the '14 one on eBay, whilst ordering myself a 2014-15 academic year one. It also came with some coloured notes pages, 6 and 12 dividers.

I got the idea from my sister who is a filofax guru to make my own dividers. So I went to Hobbycraft and bought a pack of pretty pastel cardstock and got to work at making my own dividers. Half an hour later I ended up with these...

I am pretty happy with them, I just need to make some labels to go on the tabs. I will then cover the tabs in sticky back plastic to replicate the dividers the filofax actually comes with. I also had hole reinforcers, so have put them on the reverse of the dividers.

The six sections I plan to have at the moment are:

- calendar

- lesson plans

- classes

- monitoring (for my HOD role)

- meetings

- notes

Within classes, I may make a further 12 dividers (smaller tabs) so I have one for each class.

Finally I found a picture on Pinterest where someone had their name cut out on silver card and had a black sheet behind it to give a silhouette effect. I chatted to my sister about this and she offered to make me one. I think in the filofax world it's called a dashboard. I love it!

Once I really get into this, probably in September when I actually have something to put in it, I will write an updated post.

In the meantime, do you use your filofax as your teacher planner? Do you have any tips for me? Would love to read them in the comments below.

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