Summer Pins, Fall Plans: Making Pinterest Ideas Manageable

Ah, summer! The time that you can sleep in, move at your own pace, and find that you do actually know how to relax after all! If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time on Pinterest, not just during the summer, but during the school year too. Pinterest is an amazing sea of ideas that make you instantly feel like you should be trying 1,000,001 new ideas in your classroom. You pin, you categorize, and you dream of seeing all of these ideas come together in your classroom.

So how does one find the time to implement all of those wonderful Pinterest ideas (which are usually actually blogger ideas, if we're giving proper credit, and we should)? First and foremost, you're not going to implement ALL of those ideas in one year. You have to make it manageable. As much as I want to cook 25 new pasta dishes, I am not realistically doing that in a month's time because I don't have the time or the money for all of those ingredients. The same goes for teaching ideas!

The easiest thing to do is to make those saved ideas a part of your weekly planning. Let's use a back to school example since many of us are on sumer vacation right now. I'm going to assume that everyone has a Back to School board on Pinterest. If you don't, create one NOW! Here's mine: Mrs. O "Knows" Back to School Board and here's our Classroom Tested Resources Board: Classroom Tested Resources Back to School Board.

Here's a glimpse at the 175 (and growing) ideas that I have pinned to my board. 

175 can be overwhelming, and you might have even more than that, so it's time to prioritize. Look through your pins and ask yourself, "What are the five most important pins on this board?" When you have this figured out, you're ready to create a realistic plan for your first week back. I've created a template to use as a weekly "Pinterest" plan. Each week allows for the planning of five "pins". This will stop you from becoming overwhelmed with ideas, help you to start trying these ideas, and also allow you to plan ahead for back to school since many of these ideas can be prepped ahead of time. Here's a look at an example. Click on the image to download the example and a blank planning page for your own planning.

As you get farther in to your year, you'll obviously be looking at different boards, and if you're like me, you'll be pulling from multiple boards, but I'd try to keep your plans focused on no more than five new ideas each week. If you're a blogger, this will be a great way to hop on the Five for Friday linky from Doodle Bugs Teaching. Our year can get overwhelming, and if you keep this up, you'll have tried close to 200 new ideas by the end of the year. That's pretty impressive!

If you'd prefer to do yours online, click on the image below to get the editable planning page.

One more note…if you try something and it simply does not work or wasn't for you, don't forget to go in and delete that pin from your board. There's no point in keeping ideas around that don't work for you. There's too many other pins in the sea! :-)