Hi, I'm Jenn.

I've spent over a decade with young children — in public and private preschool classrooms, a home daycare, an elementary special education setting, and as a nanny.

I hold a Master of Arts in Education from Pacific Oaks College — plus two undergraduate degrees, in early childhood education and psychology.

I built Planella because I know this job from the inside.

Here's what a preschool teacher's day actually looks like. You're moving from the moment you arrive — singing, observing, setting up activities, serving food, helping in the bathroom, managing transitions, running circle time, tracking how two kids are working something out together and deciding in real time whether to step in or let it unfold. You're monitoring fine motor development in one child and a behavioral pattern in another. You're talking to a parent at pickup while mentally resetting the room for tomorrow. From the moment you arrive to the moment you leave, your brain does not stop.

Nap time isn't a break. Nap time is when teachers cover each other for a thirty-minute lunch. Which means curriculum planning happens at lunch, or it happens at home at night. Materials get prepped after hours. Many preschool teachers design their own curriculum from scratch, every single week, on top of everything else.

This is the job I loved. It's also why I built Planella.

I've been out of the classroom a few years now, and ChatGPT wasn't a thing the last time I taught. The technology that came after is genuinely powerful — and there's no reason preschool teachers shouldn't get the benefit of it. But generic AI tools weren't built for our field. Ask one to plan a preschool lesson and you get "open-ended activities," developmentally vague suggestions, no feel for the rhythm of a real preschool morning. The model is capable. It just doesn't know preschool. So I built one that does.

After completing my own training at SBCC's NAEYC-accredited preschool program, I stayed on for two years as a mentor teacher for incoming student teachers. Watching someone grow into this work never got old.

They'd arrive on the first day nervous and overwhelmed — lesson planning alone could stop them in their tracks once they understood how much genuine thought it required. By the end of the semester, something had shifted. They knew their kids. Their plans stopped being exercises and started being responses to actual children. The best moments came when a student teacher brought a piece of their own life into the classroom — a food from their family's kitchen, a song from their culture, a way of moving that the children had never seen before. Confidence built in real time. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed in a classroom.

Planella reflects what I saw across all those years — that what you need from a lesson plan depends on where you are in the work. A student teacher needs the why behind each step. An experienced teacher wants the plan, not the over-explanation. A homeschool parent needs the activity in plain language, without classroom jargon. The tool has a mode for each. Same activity, three different plans — all framework-fluent. A scaffold for whichever stage you're in.