Best Teacher Templates (2026): 10 Gradebooks and Lesson Planners Compared

If you teach several class periods and your grading lives in a mess of tabs, start here. Bellmark is one workbook that holds a weighted gradebook, an attendance tracker, a lesson log and a dashboard, and it runs in both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. You fill in one Setup tab with your dates, classes and grading weights. After that the 15 tabs feed each other, so a student added to the Roster turns up in the gradebook, the attendance grid and every dropdown.

The gradebook is the part that earns its keep. Type EX and the assignment is ignored for that student. Type M and it counts as a zero and turns coral. Leave a cell blank and it simply waits. Category weights rescale fairly when a category has no grades yet, and one cell switches the view between Quarter 1, Semester 2 or the full year. An assignment can go to one class, every section of a course or everyone, so a test for periods 3 and 5 takes one column, not two.

Attendance runs off real dates. The grid builds 200 school days from your first and last day, then skips weekends and any No School or PD Day you add. Chronic absence uses the common 10% rule, and you can change the threshold.

Most teachers don’t have a planning problem. They have a scattered one. Lessons in a notebook, grades in another file, attendance on a clipboard, a parent call on a sticky note. The Classroom Compass Workbook pulls those into one .xlsx file with 21 tabs that talk to each other.

Add a student to the roster once and they appear in the gradebook, attendance sheet, seating chart and parent log. Add a test to Key Dates and it shows up on the weekly planner, the month calendar, the year view and the dashboard. The Weekly Planner fills itself in from your timetable and lesson log, colored by subject, with each topic and homework note. That’s the big difference from Bellmark: this one leans harder into planning the week, not just keeping score.

The gradebook handles weighted categories, M for missing and E for excused, and leaves ungraded categories out so nobody gets marked down for work you haven’t set. A banner warns you if your weights don’t add up to 100 percent. There’s also a seating chart that draws itself from desk numbers, a behavior log with positive and concern tallies, a budget tracker and a sub plan that fills in from your timetable.

Not a spreadsheet person? This version of Classroom Compass is a planner app in a single HTML file. You download it, double-click it, and it opens in your web browser. No account, nothing to install, no monthly fee. Thirty-one pages cover weekly plans, a lesson bank, unit plans, a curriculum map, grades, attendance, seating, family messages and reports.

The weekly planner is built from your own bell schedule. Click a cell, pick a class, attach a lesson, and it repeats every week on that day. Copy last week into this one with a click. Attendance is a click on P, A, T or E. Scores go into the gradebook and you press Tab to move along while averages and letter grades update.

Where it pulls ahead is the people side. Ten family message templates fill in the student, guardian and class for you, so the twentieth email takes a minute. Each student gets a profile page that gathers grades, attendance, behavior notes and contacts before a conference. And twelve reports are ready to print or save as PDF, from the class roster to a full substitute plan. You can import your class list from a CSV, search everything with Ctrl+K and undo after deleting almost anything.

This is the lighter sister of the planner above. It’s also a single HTML file that opens in your browser, with no account and nothing to install, but it has 27 pages instead of 31 and puts more weight on what happens during the lesson.

The weekly planner shows every period in your bell schedule. Tap a block and add the topic, objective, materials and homework, mark lessons as taught, and copy a week forward when you repeat a sequence. A progress bar shows how much of the week is planned. The gradebook uses your own categories and weights, and if a category has no scores yet, the others scale up so students aren’t penalized.

The seating chart is the standout. Choose rows, pairs or groups, drag students to desks or tap a name and then a desk, shuffle the room or let auto fit place everyone. Next to it sits a toolkit: a focus timer, a random picker that calls on everyone before it repeats, quick groups, a break countdown and a list of 20 brain breaks. The report card comment bank builds a paragraph from phrases you pick.

The sub plan builder pulls your schedule, lesson notes and seating chart into one printable page. Fill it in September and you won’t be writing it at 6 a.m. when you wake up sick.

Sunday planning shouldn’t take two hours. Brightweek is a printable lesson planner with soft pastel days and real room to write: 20 undated pages in one PDF that you can type into on a computer or print and fill by hand.

The heart of it is the weekly grid, in six layouts. You get 3, 4, 5 or 6 subjects across Monday to Friday, a 4-day week for Monday to Thursday, and a 7-period schedule with time slots for middle and high school. Most layouts carry a box for the week’s focus, a to-do checklist and reminders, so prep tasks stop living on sticky notes.

Around that sit the pages teachers ask for once the weekly grid is sorted: a daily lesson plan with a five-part lesson flow and reflection checkboxes, a unit planner with a five-week map, a monthly overview, a year at a glance from August to July, a scope and sequence page, an attendance tracker for 12 months by 31 days and a grade tracker for 22 students by 12 assignments. A clickable contents page links to everything.

Teaching little ones is its own kind of planning. You’re thinking in themes, centers, circle time and letter of the week, not periods and pacing guides. Brightside is a 22-page printable kit made for preschool and pre-K teachers, kindergarten teachers, home daycare providers and homeschool parents.

There are four weekly layouts with 4 to 7 subject rows in rainbow columns. The page we’d reach for first is the weekly theme planner: letter, number, color and shape of the week, books, songs, words to learn and ideas for sensory, art, science and movement, with a prep checklist. There’s also a daily routine with eleven named blocks from arrival to closing circle, a learning centers rotation for six centers over five days, and a skills tracker for 18 students across 12 early learning skills.

Be clear on one thing before you buy: these pages are print-first and not fillable. You write on them with a pen, pencil or dry-erase marker. The ink-saver files skip the color fills, so a classroom set won’t drain your printer.

Some weeks you need more than a grid. You’ve got a formal observation on Tuesday, or a student teaching supervisor who wants to see standards, differentiation and a timed lesson flow. ChalkBright is a fillable PDF kit with six planning pages built for exactly that kind of plan.

The Detailed Lesson Plan is the reason to buy it. It covers standards, objectives, key vocabulary and a five-phase lesson flow table (warm-up, direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice and closure). There’s a differentiation section for support, extension and IEP, 504 and ELL accommodations, plus assessment type tick boxes and a short reflection.

The rest of the kit fills the gaps around it: a one-page daily plan, a weekly planner with six editable rows, a unit planner with a 10-lesson sequence and a Done box for each lesson, a substitute plan with a box for the sub to write back to you, and a lesson reflection page that rates engagement from 1 to 5 and asks whether you’d teach it again. The contents page includes a 45-minute lesson timing guide and an objective verb bank, which is handy when you’re stuck on how to phrase a goal.

Most teachers end up with one plan format and bend every lesson to fit it. That works until you need a 5E science plan, a reading workshop plan or a pacing calendar for the month. Lesson Plan Studio gives each job its own layout: 16 editable Word templates in one download.

The list is long and useful. Daily, formal (two pages with thinking levels and reflection), gradual release, 5E, direct instruction, reading workshop, math, small group, project-based, substitute, two weekly plans (by subject or by time block), unit plan, monthly pacing calendar, standards coverage tracker and a lesson reflection page.

What makes it different from a plain Word table is the form controls. Gray prompts vanish when you type, dropdowns let you pick the subject, grade, grouping or thinking level, date pickers pop up a calendar, and checkboxes tick with a click. Boxes grow as you type, so a long objective never gets cut off. You get 64 individual files (Letter and A4, color and black and white), four all-in-one files with a clickable contents page, and blank PDFs for handwriting.

If 16 templates sounds like too many, this is the calm alternative. Teacher’s Compass gives you five one-page planners: a detailed daily plan, a quick daily plan, a weekly plan, a unit plan and a substitute plan. Type into the Word files or print the PDFs and write by hand.

The quick daily plan is the one busy teachers will live in. It follows the I do, we do, you do pattern, with success criteria and an exit ticket, and it’s built for days when you have ten minutes rather than an hour. The detailed plan adds a timed five-stage lesson flow with a minutes field for each stage, so your plan adds up to the period. There are four differentiation boxes (approaching, on level, enrichment and accommodations) and room for an “I can” statement.

Nothing is locked. Click a gray heading and type over it, so “Standards” can become “Learning targets” and “Key vocabulary” can become “Word wall”. You can add rows to the unit plan or change the shading to your school colors. Two color styles come in the box: Classic Gray for low-ink printing and Soft Sage for a gentler look.

Teaching at home has a different paperwork problem. You’re planning for several kids at different levels, and depending on your state you may need day counts, hour logs, a portfolio or a transcript. Hearthwood is a homeschool planner app for one child or six that turns those records into a by-product of planning.

Plan a lesson, tick it off, and the rest follows. Ticking a lesson marks that day present for that child, so you only log sick days, half days and field trips. Lesson minutes, extra learning time and field trips roll into one hours total, split into core and elective, home and away. Missed a day? One tap moves every unfinished lesson to the next school day, skipping breaks and holidays.

The gradebook has weighted categories you can rename, an editable grading scale and a credit-weighted GPA. Around it sit a family calendar, a reading log with a yearly challenge, goals with printable award certificates, a chore chart, a field trip planner, a photo portfolio and a budget with tax-record flags and CSV export. Report cards, transcripts, attendance reports and 10 more printables come in US Letter or A4.