Preschool- Planning and Organization

If you know me, you know I am a planner.  As an elementary school teacher, that aspect of my personality helped me in many ways.  As a teacher of 1, I want to make sure that I am giving Little Guy what I gave to my students.  So I am back to planning!

To plan for our homeschool preschool this year, I wanted to make sure I was including many skills, not just the ones I remember.  I started searching for some planners.  I found this one from Homeschool Creations.  It is customizable, so that is really handy.  However, since I am planning on doing preschool only 2 days a week, I did not need a daily planner.  Then I found this one on Not Just Cute.  It is a thematic planner with lots of different aspects of a preschool curriculum.  Based on this, I created my own planner, then tweaked it even more.

This is the planner I used when planning our insects unit.  (Some of the lines show how I wanted it re-organized.)  While I created it in Excel, I found it easier to print and write on.  Not all activities were completed during our unit, but I can use it to roll ideas forward.  After this first draft, I made some modifications.

I feel like this is a very usable document for me. I can have several printed off and plan ideas for the next several units.  It will be great as I search on Pinterest to actually write down the ideas, not just pin them for later, to be forgotten.  I don't think I will fill every box for every unit, but I can use these to make sure that over time all are included.

So now that the planning was under control, I had to organize all these activities.  So I bought this cart.

I'm sure you've seen them before.  I picked my up at JoAnn's.  Its nice because it will hold 10 different activities, with a place to stack additional items on the top.  Previously, I was using some baskets that could stack together, but whenever we went to work, I laid them out on the floor, and they took up a bit of floor space (I can't tell you how many times I kicked and tripped on those baskets!).  Little Guy can easily pull out the drawer he wants and it is easy to find the activity you are looking for. 

How do you organize ideas and activities for your preschooler?