It’s the beginning of the year and you’ve found your favorite teacher planner after weeks of searching for the perfect lesson planner. But maybe you’re realizing that it just isn’t going to work for your special education classroom and schedule.
But how can you customize it without spending an arm and a leg on stickers or printing your own pages?
Today I am going to share how you can make your own custom stickers for your special education teacher lesson planner based on your specific classroom and student needs and what is going to be the most successful for you.
If you are more of a watcher than a reader, check out the video demonstrating how to make these stickers here:
What do you need in order to make these stickers?
- A laptop, computer, or tablet
- One of the following programs: PowerPoint, Canva, Keynote (for Macs), or Word
- A printer
- Full sheet Avery labels
- Your teacher lesson planner (see my review video here)
- And of course, a schedule of some kind.
For reference, I used The Happy Planner in the video above, but you can use these in whichever planner you’ve chosen for your class and/or caseload.
First, you want to determine what places you want to put your stickers or labels.
- Some places you can add stickers are on your monthly calendar, weekly planning areas or blank spaces above/below/next to the calendar and/or weekly planning boxes.
When you decide what spaces on your lesson planner pages you want to make stickers for, go ahead and measure those spaces and write the measurements down on a note somewhere. I recommend writing them down so you have them for the next step.
Next, we are going to make the stickers on your computer! If you’re more of a visual learner, please watch the video above. Again, there are plenty of different programs you can use, but PowerPoint is my go to for all the things, so that’s what I’m going to use and describe how to use.
Step 1: Measuring the sizes of spots you want to customize in your specific planner.
We already did this, so check!
Step 2: Open up PowerPoint to a fresh document the size of a sheet of 8.5” x 11” paper.
Click on the shape icon to create a square. Then either right click to select shape format, or double click on the shape. By clicking shape format, you can see how big it is and edit the measurements as needed. Change the shape size by entering the measurements from step 1. Then lock the shape so that the dimensions stay the same if you want to expand or decrease the size of your shape but keep the same ratio.
After this, you will want to choose an outline and fill in this shape for whatever you want the shape to be. I personally prefer to have a thick black outline with a white inside, but you could of course fill in the color to color code your planner or fit your preferred color scheme.
- If you don’t want to have an outline of the shape, I recommend filling in the shape with a color so when you go to cut it out, you know where to cut making sure the sticker is the right size.
Step 3: Make a text box as big as the shape.
Then type in whatever text you’d like to put inside the sticker. For example, in the video I had mine say “Morning Meeting” for the first spot in our classroom schedule and the first spot in my teacher lesson planner. (To read about our morning routine, go here.)
- Want to add some fun to your sticker? You can upload a picture from the internet, or one you may already have saved on your computer that goes with that part of the day. Play around with the sizing of the clipart and the text so it looks the way you want it to look.
- You can even add more details to this sticker for what that time of day is going to look like – so for Morning Meeting you can add things like the time frame this activity occurs, breakfast, calendar routine, morning binders, or days of the week activity.
If you want to make multiple stickers, all you have to do is copy and paste the first one you made. You can copy and paste the whole box, just the outline, just the text or clipart… it’s up to you! You get to customize them.
Step 4: Save your sticker page as a PDF, then print.
This is where the full page Avery labels come into play.
Step 5: Once your stickers are printed, cut them out and put them in your teacher lesson planner as needed.
Tadaa! You did it, you customized your generic teacher lesson planner to make it more specific for your classroom and individual needs.
TIP: This can be done for everything – from your schedule, to IEP Meeting stickers, professional development stickers, to do lists, reminders, parent-teacher conferences, anything you can think of to help keep you organized and further customize your lesson planner.
I know that it’s hard to find a teacher lesson planner that is helpful in a special education setting, and I hope that this tutorial has helped you customize your teacher lesson planner.
Have you ever created your own teacher lesson planner stickers? Let us know in the comments below!
