Recording keeping is to a homeschool mom as air is to lungs – required to survive and thrive. For years I have managed assignments by creating a spreadsheet and printing it before the school year begins. I still do that, but there are so many things that don’t fit into a chart like that.
When I recently changed my bullet journal over to a discbound system – where I can add and take out pages as needed – I put a section in it for our homeschool. Terryn from over at Just a Simple Home asked me to review her Simplified Homeschool Planner, and I was excited to try it out in my new planner.
The planner has a variety of pages and comes in PDF format so you can print as man of each page as you need. I personally didn’t need every page included which is also a nice feature of this being a download – no wasted paper or wasted space in your planner from pages you’ll never use! Here are the spreads using the pages that will work well for my planner.
I’ve never had a mission statement or written goals so I’m still working on what to write.
This Year at a Glance page is great to make little monthly notes and things to look forward to.
This school supplies list has already grown just since I took these photos. Having a list of things to copy and laminate has been very handy since our new books came in.
While we don’t participate in very many extra curricular activities, but this page will still be useful to keep track of small trips or projects. The Attendance page is designed to be used for one student (note the blank at the top for a name) but if one of my kids does school then they all do, so I only needed one page and will just check off each box as we go.
We’ve already planned two field trips for the fall when we are going on vacation so I’ve already written them in, but this list will also grow as we go through the school year.
One note I’d like to make is this says “2018/2019” on the cover BUT the only page inside the planner that is dated is the Yearly Planning page. So you could easily reprint all the pages in the future, which is nice for the thrifty moms (like me.)
The graphics Terryn used are lovely and colorful. The cover is very pretty.
There are several sections with nice clean title pages like “Lesson Plans” and “Record Keeping”. I also like how simple the graphics are.
Some of the other pages included are:
- Curriculum planning pages
- Weekly schedule
- Unit Study planning pages
- Digital Resources tracker
- Yearly Planning pages
- Monthly planning pages
- Lesson plan pages with room to prep for next week
- Reading Logs
- Grade tracker
- Websites and password tracker
My only complaint about the Simplified Homeschool Planner is some of the letters were chopped off when I printed this in “actual size” – when I reprint these for next year I’ll try to remember to print them “to fit” instead. This is such a small thing, but I feel it could have been avoided by using a different font or bringing it down on the page.
This is such a great resource for homeschool moms and I would recommend it to anyone who needs help organizing their homeschool plans and records. As of the time I am publishing this post, there is a 50% off sale for the Simplified Homeschool Planner.Be sure to check out all the details >>here<<.
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