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I have never been able to just pick a curriculum for our homeschooling. Nothing has ever felt like just the right fit for us. So, I have always picked a little of this, a little of that, to make our very eclectic curriculum. There is one reason that I am jealous of people who go with a set curriculum, however. I would love someone else to do more of the planning for me.
Each year, I have changed up how I have done our planning. During our first year of homeschooling, I bought a teacher lesson plan book and hand wrote everything in. During our second year, I did this again, but I also used a file box to keep many of our papers organized for each week. Last year, I planned the entire year during the summer using Donna Young’s Basic Unlabeled Weekly form (that I tweaked). I put them all in a three ring binder in sections based on subject. Then, each week, I would just write up assignment sheets for the kids from each section.
This year, I used Donna Young’s free forms again – two page weekly lesson plans, attendance, grading, and field trip forms, and I bound it all with my comb binding machine into a book that I will hand write in. (Although, I did type in regularly occurring things, before printing, so that I don’t have to write them over and over.)
Here is my new planner (with four weeks of plans written in!):
I’m feeling really good about this, and hope that it works out well for us. I know that every year, I decide to change things up, but hopefully this is a good culmination of all of the changes that I have wanted to make to the actual organization aspect of our home educating.
Now, if you don’t feel like putting together a whole binder yourself, there are plenty of commercial planners available, as well as some great ebooks that blogging homeschoolers have put together, such as:
Jessica Fisher, from Life as Mom, has her Organizing Life as Mom ebook, and she has add-ons (which can be purchased separately) for bloggers and for homeschoolers!
Jolanthe of Homeschool Creations has her amazing planner with 138 planning pages on interactive PDF files. You can see samples pages on her site as well.
If you’re a homeschooler, what method do you use for planning out your days?
This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday.
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Great planner!!!
Nice! I love making my own planner. This is the second year I’ve made my own (although it isn’t all printed out and put together yet) and I learned a lot from what I did last year that didn’t work like I thought it would. I like what I’ve come up with for this year, simple and flexible and hopefully will suit our eclectic style as well!
I can’t help but tweak things each year. I’m hoping this is going to be a good fit for us.
sorry about this, but is there a way to remove the twitter name from my comment? i don’t know how that got there! it doesn’t go to my twitter page at all!!
I can’t find a way to get rid of that for you. I’m sorry! It would have auto filled it from someone when you (or someone on your computer?) did it. Make sure that the next time you have an option to do it on someone’s comments to put in your twitter name. Then, it should (theoretically) remember the right one.
I was just feeling frustrated with my planner today and thinking about how I could change things up for this year. Thanks for sharing how you work things!
Great post! I’m in the middle of making my own planner. I hope to post pictures of it soon. /Thanks for sharing your specific links.
I found these this morning:
http://sanctussimplicitus.weebly.com/index.html
and I saw these at the IHM National Catholic Homeschooling Conference and fell in love with them:
http://family-centered.com/shop/category/all/
We are using Seton Home Study and I’m currently handwriting them into the planner that Seton sends with their curriculum. I will probably end up doing one of the above planners just for the ease of having everything together (meal planning & lesson planning) and just binding it myself if I do the first one from Sanctus Simplicitus. I like the bound books better than loose leaf or 3 ring binder.
WOW! I’m impressed and will pass this along to people who are on the front end of homeschooling. This year I will launch my first- he is a senior.
Wow – your planner looks amazing! Maybe I need a comb binder! Now to convince dh of this brilliant idea….. and of course, copy your idea shamelessly!
I love the idea of a bound planner. Last year was my first year of homeschooling and I just kept loose sheets. Would love to be more organized this year! Thanks for sharing your insights and experience Angie.
I finally made my own planner as well and decided to sell it over at our site http://www.sanctussimplicitus.com Next year I’ll be expanding it and putting even more organizational goodies in it. I like that I can keep my liturgical year plans and my lesson plans and my menu plan in one spot! I don’t think there is truley one curriculum that fits a whole families children. All children are different and all mother’s teach differently… but that is the benefit of homeschooling!