A good teacher’s planner . . .
is one of the most important tools a homeschool mom can own.
based on seven-day weeks. That way, you
can include weekend activities on your
planner.
This planner has all you need within its
spiral-bound pages. There are calendars for
the previous year, this year, and coming
year, which are great for long-term planning. There are many places to record your
plans and inspirations from brainstorming.
This planner has pages for field trips, a
check-off list of requirements, resource
pages and semester objectives, and
tracking for all those books, CD-ROMs,
and videos/DVDs that you have used
throughout the year.
The Homeschooler’s High School
Journal was my best friend for many years.
Again, it is a blessedly simple planner, but
this one is geared toward the special record
keeping that we need to do for our high
schoolers. As before, they have given us
calendars that span several years, as well as
60 Lesson Planner
a Linear Schedule of Home Schooling
Events. This is a great feature, especially if
your children are involved in sports, music,
clubs, service projects, or other extracurricular activities; the whole school year is
spread out on two pages for your perusal.
One of the most helpful parts of the
whole planner, to me, is the page of Yearly
Requirements. This page is laid out for all
four high school years (freshman through
senior) across the top, with the subjects
listed down the left-hand side (English,
Math, Science, Social Studies, Arts &
Humanities, Computer Science/Business,
and two elective areas). On this one page I
can keep track of (depending on my child’s
high school year) what my child has
completed, and if I pre-plan, what he or she
needs to complete by graduation!
There are also spaces to keep track of
total credits earned. Speaking of credits,
when my oldest (a homeschool graduate of
2006!) began her high school years, one of
the questions I had was, How do I determine how many credits to assign to each
subject? Once again, this planner gave me
the answer. They suggest 1= 1 year, ½ = ½
year. Wow, who knew it was that easy?! I
extended that for our own school to include
a subject done for one quarter (a short unit
study or project) or one day a week
(gym/P.E. or band/music or dance) to
receive ¼ credit.
There are other great sections besides
the two hundred days’ worth of course
work pages. One is the Lending and
Borrowing Resource List. How many
times has someone borrowed a book from
you and just when you need it, it’s nowhere
to be found and you can’t remember whom
you loaned it to? Problem solved here.
A handy page to have before you run off
to your state’s homeschool convention or
make that online order at TOS’s
Schoolhouse Store is the Resource List
page. There’s even a column in which you
can keep track of the costs. Then there’s the
Objectives and Resources page for those
long-range research projects.
For those of you who live in a state that
requires you to keep track of attendance,
Ferg N’ Us has covered that for you too.
Also, included on each regular journal
page is a section where you can keep track
of hours spent on each subject, denoted by
quarter-hour marks.
Two of our most used sections were the
Field Trip Log and the Educational
Supplements tracker. The Field Trip Log,
as you might assume, has space to record
where you went, the host’s name,
contact/phone info, date, and objectives of
the trip. By the end of the year you will
have a diary of memories and fun! Anyone
who still thinks that homeschoolers are
stuck at home needs to have a look at my
planner!
Another most-used section of our planner
is the Educational Supplements pages. I am
a firm believer in recording everything that
can remotely be deemed as having educational value, including books we read, books
on tape, videos/DVDs, learning games,
activities with educational value that take
place while on vacation, and some
television. The Educational Supplements pages
are where we record those things. There are
sections for the Date, Title/Web Site
Address, and Author/Composer/Date
Due/Classification. The Classification
section is great, because you can record
whether your supplement was a book,
tape/CD, video, music, or a resource from
the Internet and if it was nonfiction, fiction,
biography, or reference material. On this I
wish they had added T.V. (which we added
ourselves), because our students are required
to watch such things as the President’s State
of the Union Address and certain programs
dealing with history or historical figures.
The Crème de la Crème—
The Schoolhouse Planner!
The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine’s
publishers have just released one of the
most helpful resources I’ve ever used!
Parents, if I had been given this planner
sixteen years ago, when I first began
homeschooling, I would never have had to
use anything else.
Right off the bat, the most unique thing
about The Schoolhouse Planner is that it is
an E-Book; it is 247 pages of unique and
much-needed help! This planner also
