The Schoolhouse Planner
I’m an eclectic homeschooler, and I like to put together my own customized curriculum using a variety of resources, taking into account my children’s learning styles, levels, and interests as well as our family’s goals and needs. I liken it to gathering different plants, fruits, flowers, and berries for my garden basket. As lovely as that sounds, in reality it can be challenging to organize all of the information and keep track of what we’ve done and where we’re going! I have previously used spiral-bound day planners to record our learning activities and book lists, and although that served my needs for homeschooling one child, I need something with more space and that’s better organized to meet my needs now that I’ll be homeschooling two and will be adding subjects to our schedule.
The Schoolhouse Planner is a 247-page print-your-own planner published by The Old Schoolhouse Magazine that includes many forms that you’re not likely to find in a ready-made planner or calendar. I can select the forms I want and print only what I need in order to create my own customized planner, not just for our home education program but also for our household management and my personal goals. Even better, I can type directly onto the forms!
Whether you’re the type of person who likes to plan out an entire year’s worth of curriculum before school starts or the type who turns a broken blender into a spontaneous lesson about how motors work, you’ll find helpful information and tools in this planner. The Schoolhouse Planner includes yearly, daily, and week-at-a-glance calendars and even a 12-year calendar so that you can see the big picture for your child’s education. Each monthly section includes recipes, tables and charts, timeline information, and essays to encourage you throughout the year. Some of the topics and fun facts covered are setting the family table, lists of presidents, geography lessons, kitchen and measurement conversion charts, math, science, art, and communication. Copies of the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other historical documents are provided in the planner as well. Having this material readily available could be useful, but I think providing links to the documents online would have been sufficient, as they account for over 30 pages of the planner. Monthly modules will also be available to add to the planner throughout the year.
The Homeschool Forms section of The Schoolhouse Planner is the most helpful to me, especially at this time of year! The forms encompass short- and long-term goal setting and provide space for items specifically of interest to homeschooling families such as book lists, nature journaling pages, field trip planning and recording sheets, and audio/video logs. The forms include annual plans, yearly goals, pages to record where your child is at the beginning and end of the school year (including space for photos), and a curriculum planning sheet for taking notes while researching products and curriculum. You can find forms that are appropriate for a school-at-home homeschooling approach, with places to record grades and test scores, a formal course of study, educational objectives, end-of-year evaluations and report cards. You can also find an unschooling form to record learning activities that occur in various subject areas throughout the week.
The Household Forms section includes pages for menu planning, grocery lists, chore lists for parents and kids, budgeting and financial forms, a Bible reading schedule, gift wish list, and an address list in addition to other household management tools. I like the illustrated chore chart for kids, and it provides plenty of room for foil stars for jobs completed.
The Schoolhouse Planner provides many options for me to create a customized planner to go along with my customized curriculum! I’m going to get a Trapper Keeper (remember those?) and include many of these forms for homeschool record keeping and to manage household duties. I can print off the forms that I want and integrate them with the pages I’ve created myself at Google Docs or that I’ve found at DonnaYoung.org. I will include copies of my state’s homeschooling law, vaccination records, attendance form, and other information.
