Diary Building 101: Your Weekly Lesson Notes

It’s the heart of your diary—the pages where you record notes about this lesson, and what students need to prepare for next lesson. Here’s how to create your spread.

[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full]

[av_one_full first] [av_textblock ]

Choose a left page and a right page to make your spread

Remember, this is the part of the diary that you’ll be writing in each week, with lesson summaries/practice instructions/notes to parents etc.

5 of the possible 58 layouts are shown below (click to enlarge each); you can see all 58 choices here.[/av_textblock] [av_hr class=’invisible’ height=’20’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’] [av_gallery ids=’745,746,747,748,749′ style=’thumbnails’ preview_size=’portfolio’ thumb_size=’portfolio’ columns=’3′ imagelink=’lightbox’] [/av_one_full]

[av_textblock] The idea is that you choose one layout to be the left page of each spread, another for the right. If you want to, you can have the same layout for both pages. You won’t be worrying too much about headings in this first step—that comes next—all you’ll be doing is deciding where you want the empty sections to be.[/av_textblock]

[av_hr class=’invisible’ height=’35’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’] [av_one_full first] [av_textblock ]

Create your headers

Once you’ve chosen your layouts, you can replace the generic “Your Header Here” with your actual headings—this is where you can get creative and ensure the spread matches exactly how your studio operates.

The five examples below all use exactly the same layout, but the chosen headers accommodate five startlingly different ways of working in lessons. That’s the point: it’s your studio, you get to decide how it runs. Your diary should reflect that.

Same layout, 5 very different sets of headers—for 5 very different studios.

[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full] [av_one_full first] [av_textblock ]

Set how many times it should repeat

A spread would normally be everything you need for comprehensive notes for a single lesson. The exception is if you’ve set both pages in the spread to be identical, in which case a spread could cover two lessons.

You’ve got up to 96 pages to play with in your diary; how many you allocate to the lesson spread is entirely up to you. So, for example, if you set up your diary to cover 32 lessons, that would require 64 pages, leaving you with 32 pages for the introduction and practice tools sections.