About Our Daily Planners

As someone who thrives off of structure, I knew I needed to have some sort of planner to get us through the homeschool day. When we did school at home remotely last Spring, we had a weekly schedule created by the teacher. This provided an easy way for us to stay on track as well as give my learning-to-study-independently child the ability to see what he needed to do and check it off when complete. I liked this.

The list means even on days when I’m not feeling great (and I know there’ll be plenty of days like that this year), we have a list to keep us motivated and on track. Since our goal is to reintegrate back into the typical school scenario next year, we need to keep up the pace.

Each child has their own weekly planner. There’s an attendance tracker (though I know not required for my kindergartener) as well as weekly planning pages with a checkbox for each subject. (I found the attendance tracker for free and just added it to my file for printing).

Originally, I had thought I would plan out a month ahead for each kid but as we’ve just made it through the first two weeks, I’ve adjusted this strategy. Now I mostly plan a week out. I have a high level idea of what we need to do to stay on track in my mind and as we approach each subject during the day I either stay on the suggested plan or if we do a little more or less then I just write down what we actually did in the planner and adjust the week accordingly. Not pictured below is the first page of the week which includes our weekly memory verse as well.

I designed the planner in PowerPoint and had it printed and bound at FedEx. I’ve been to Fedex quite a bit in the last month! There were a lot of free homeschool planners but I prefer my bare bones basic checklist.

Along with the weekly school planners, each kid has a daily checklist of personal care and household activities they need to complete each day. If it’s on the list than it’s expected that most of the items get done every single day. Again, just another tool for my organized self to keep us on track and hold everyone accountable. I found this free printable here and then had Fedex print and laminate.

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About Curriculum

Perhaps the this first post should’ve been about why we decided to homeschool this year but that’ll have to come later. At the beginning of this year we knew we’d be be switching schools and I never felt right about any of our choices. I was plagued with indecision and worried that no school felt like the right school. Little did we know a mere 6 weeks after registering at a new school, the world would drastically change after being hit with the you-know-what.

When beginning to plan for homeschool, the best way that made sense to me was to use the curriculum used at our last school as the starting point. I could add and subtract from that while trusting that it would be the right challenge for my 3rd grader who had been thriving at school. The only piece of curriculum I changed for my 3rd grader was the writing and rhetoric course (sadly the online version of this course is for 4-5 grades) and science. My kindergartner has no school history so I changed up the phonics/reading program.

Our homeschool method will be part classical and part traditional. This is my first and last year of homeschooling so I think we’ll just have to see how things works out. I must say it has been quite exciting receiving all of the packages filled with curriculum books these past couple of weeks. Even though I thought I was ahead of the game when I ordered everything I needed the first week of August, turns out I may not have been as several items are on back order. As long as I get everything by the end of September, I figure I’m still on track.

The next phase has been reviewing the material and mapping out the plan. In my next post, I’ll share the weekly academic planner that I made and how I’m using that to map out our daily academic activities.

3rd Grade:

Grammar & Writing	Online course at Veritas Press
Handwriting	D’Nealian Handwriting Workbook level 4
Spelling	Spell to Write and Read Wise Guide for Spelling Black Learning Log
Math	Math in Focus Homeschool Package – 3 Math in Focus Manipulative Kit Calculadder Timed Math Drills
History	Online Self-paced course at Veritas Press: New Testament, Greece & Rome
Bible	Online Self-paced course at Veritas Press: Gospels
Science	The Sassafras Science Adventures: Anatomy + SCIDAT Logbook
Language	Rosetta Stone Unlimited – Latin

Kindergarten:

Handwriting	D’Nealian Handwriting Workbook level 4
Spelling	Spell to Write and Read Wise Guide for Spelling
Math	Math in Focus Homeschool Package – K Math in Focus Manipulative Kit Calculadder Timed Math Drills
Bible	The Child’s Story Bible
Phonics	The Phonics Museum Combo Kit – Veritas Press