Homeschool Schedule and Planner Layout

The last two years I made a planner using Publisher and had it printed at Staples. It was a lot of work and expensive to print. This year I wanted to keep things simple and decided to use a spiral bound notebook instead. This notebook has been the best planner out of all the years I've homeschooled!

I printed our weekly schedule in color and taped it inside the cover of my notebook. Then I use color coordinating ink pens and colored pencils to match the printed schedule. It's colorful and yet simple at the same time.

I don't use a planner to schedule out what needs to be done, I use it to keep up with what we've completed. In the morning, I check what is scheduled for the day and transfer that to our current date.  I write the date and then in green ink (our together subjects) I go down the page adding the subjects, skipping every two lines. First skipped line is my son's and his is written in blue, the second is my daughter's and she is in pink. To draw the eye more (or maybe just to please it) I "highlight" the words with the same colored pencil. As we move through our day I add what we've done and if needed, I have room in the margins to write notes.

                       

Just in case you were wondering, we love our new schedule! The time slots are all designated the same. A together subject, followed by a round robin of my son requiring assistance and my daughter working independently, till after the next together subject where that switches up. Then my son works independently while I help my daughter. It's basically the same all week long with just a few variations in some of our subjects. The kids like knowing what's next. 

Our attendance record is hole punched and in a three ring binder along with "printed" lesson plan schedules. We call it the "Mom Binder" and it is divided by subject; Records, Bible, Language Arts, Math, History, Geography, Science and Nature Study. Since my planner is three hole punched I could clip it into my binder but I haven't found it necessary yet.

So there you have it, an easy peasy and inexpensive way to keep up with your days!

BUJO with Charlotte Mason

We are moving into our second term of our second year with Ambleside Online. We are so blessed to have such an amazing curriculum provided for free! Thank you, Ambleside Advisory!!

In this short time, I have tweaked the schedules so many different ways to suit our family. All of which were completely unnecessary. Over time, I've made scheduling sheets for each child, I've added readers, science curriculum, geography books, a Bible curriculum, and who knows what else, making it so much harder than it really needs to be.

I have prayed and prayed that the Good Lord would cover our homeschool journey and fill in the gaps that I couldn't see. I have a terrible time seeing the big picture of things. I am so focused on the now that the end result tends to escape me. I know it's there, I have an idea of what I want but I fail in seeing how it's accomplished.

That is until I started working on my "Birds Eye View" chart. I created a matrix of AO years 1-12 using excel. I've only completed years 1-4 so far and I'm already discovering how the Advisory has intricately woven this curriculum together. I will trust that AO is enough. As a result of this leap of faith, our days have grown simpler.

In the spirit of simplicity, I've done away with the long detailed sheets, the check boxes, the extra readers, and the external curriculum supplements. I now have one page in my BUJO dedicated to the weekly overview of what needs to be accomplished!

Buying the heavy-weight paper required for my disc planner is more expensive than washi tape, so I just print on regular paper and then tape it in place.

I love this format, for my weekly dashboard. I can see at a glance what needs to be accomplished. If I miss something it's easily traveled to the next day. This works for me. In between each week (the back side of these pages) are my bullet lists for the day. I had a downloaded and shrunk version of the 36-week schedule in the back of my journal but I now work directly from the AO site. I've found I had been missing some great tidbits and helps in the weekly lists making things unnecessarily harder.

Next will be a simple list for the kids to work through. My youngest is reading now, which makes it easier. This will also point them in the direction of being independent learners and self-starters, I hope!