Homeschool Planning: Getting Your Planner Organized
(This is the third post in a series of planning post, and the second post on planning for our homeschool.)
For me this step is indispensable. Though you may decide it's not really for you. And that's ok, one of the big keys to successful planning, is finding a system that works for you. Otherwise, you simply aren't going to use it. I explained back in our first post, that for me, it needs to be fun and colorful, or I'm not going to use it. That may not be true for you. I have discovered in the planning community, that there are those who are "no white space" planners, they need every inch covered with stickers and washi and color to use their planners. That doesn't work for me because I can't see what's going on. There are those that are "pen only" or black and white planners, for me I need more than a pen to organize my thoughts, and black and white is boring, and I get away from planning, and as a result my time, life, our schooling, falls into chaos. For me part of planning is decorating, and organizing with stickers, washi, colorful pens. You may just need a notebook, and some colorful pens. You may use washi to divide up a page, but only use a pencil or pen for all your notes. The real goal for today, is to organize your planner, and section it out so that it will hold everything you decided that you needed. I've begun laying out my homeschool planner for next year, so I'll share some photos from it. If you find it hard to imagine what all you might need, or how you might use it, I'll suggest you tube. When I decided to try the Erin Condren Teacher Planner, there were several pages that I knew wouldn't really work for me as a homeschooler. But I found lots of other homeschoolers had done videos or blog post showing how they reworked pages to fit their needs. There are also free printables that you might get online, such as here at Life of a Homeschool Mom, to print up and glue into your planner. I personally like to print mine on full page labels, and put them in like a sticker sheet when I add a whole page like that.
So, I have a list of everything I want to be sure I keep in my planner. And after our last post I'm going to assume you do to. Remember this may be more or less than what you've done before, and it may change every year. I showed where my planning has changed alot of the five years we've been homeschooling. This year I know that I want the following:
- A fun cover page.
- Plenty of room for our reading list (and I mean PLENTY).
- Room also for list of videos and websites that we use.
- Some goal setting pages.
- A place to break those goals down into monthly forecasting.
- A space to make some notes about the curriculum we are using.
- A place to store important homeschool contact info that I don't regularly use.
- A page for library information.
- Monthly calendars.
- Weekly Lesson planning pages.
- Note pages for reviewing progress through the year.
- A place to record grades.
- A place to record field trips.
- Maybe a place to put the chore charts or add some pictures.
- A folder and/or page protectors for the loss pages I need to save or add.
It sounds like a lot, but I want everything that relates to our homeschooling in one spot. I want to be able to easily find something without it taking me alot of time. I also want it to be fun and cute. This doubles for our family as a nice record of what kids were doing, where they were developmentally. I always get a kick of flipping back through at the end of the year and seeing the cute things they said, or thought. When they first had that break through moment with reading or finally grasped a math concept that had been giving them trouble. One of the greatest blessings for homeschooling, is getting to see those moments with your kids. It's every bit as fun as the first time they said Momma or started walking, or blew you a kiss.
One more shameless plug for the ECTP. It has plenty of room for all of this, some years I haven't even used all the pages. It comes with a folder and the page protectors. It also comes with tabs, so it's super easy to find what you want to find. I have contemplated making my own planner out of a notebook, but sturdy tabs that don't rip off the pages, are one of my biggest deterrents to that. I really doubt that I will ever find another planner that I like better for our needs or that is a better quality.
So, here's where I start with our yearly planning. I flip through the planner and try to see which pages would make the best layout for those categories. I typically use a lot of post it notes at first to map out what I'm going to put where, so that I can move things around. And once I have an idea of what I want, I pull out my washi and stickers and set it all up. A few notes about my supplies. I love washi it's not just decorative, but it's great for dividing up things on a page, and most of the time, unless it's been on the page forever, I can always pull it up and move it, in contrast to using a pen or marker. Because then it's there, and while you can use white out to cover it up. It never looks quite right. I also have some chalkboard washi, that I can write on with a chalkpen and then erase. I have used it on all of my reading list headers. So if I end up using more history books than I thought I would, but not as many science books, I can change the header on the page in the middle of the year, no problem. I also color code for each kid in our planner. So it's import to me to be able to use that throughout the book. Britt's color is orange, Ruth's is pink, Rebecca's is purple, and I'm using teal for Kate this year. For things that we all do together, I most often note in black. I also use small label stickers like the ones that come in the planner, to put things like field trips and such on. If things change I can peal those up, and still have a practically clean box there. In the past I have used frixion pens in my teacher planner, because I can color code, and it's easier to see and read than pencil because it doesn't smudge. BUT I can still erase and move lesson plans around.
The yearly goal setting and the monthly pages allow me to check back through the year, and see if we are meeting our goals. Sometimes we are and that's great. Sometimes we are even ahead, and I know which subjects we can pause, if we need to spend more time elsewhere, without missing out on anything I wanted to cover. Sometimes I can see that what I planned was unreasonable, and we aren't going to cover everything this year. But either way, I can see progress, so it helps with feeling like we haven't accomplished anything when we get to the end of the year. For this the page with some lines for each month is helpful to organize, and it lets me find it quicker, and cover more ground than a page of just lined notebook pages would.
On the calendar pages, I can put in things that I know will affect our homeschooling routine, or things that I think would be great to do to add to our homeschooling year. This is something I use weekly as I plan our our lessons, because I obviously can't plan a full day of work on a day that we plan to be gone for 6 hours. Setting everything up is something I typically do over a week. I don't rush this. To be honest it's one of the funner parts of planning, decorating and thinking about what our next year will look like. And this is something I'll continue tweaking throughout the first several months of school. The important thing for me, is to get my big things set up and ready to work.
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