My Own Student Planners

This year I purchased 2 student planners for my girls to use.  They were $4 ea. at Lakeshore Learning.  I wrote in their daily assignments and they checked them off.  It worked well overall, but as with every system, tweaks are always needed.  


I have started to think ahead to next year.  Over the past two days, I spent time making a new planner for them.  I found that it was time consuming for me to write down everything.  It was equally time consuming to write everything down on my own planner.  I found that I was often a week behind.  But, a planner is one thing that my homeschooling umbrella requires to see at the end of the year and I really think that it's a beneficial thing to keep.  So, I also made a page for my own planner.  Making one's own planner is not necessarily money saving, but it is time saving.  My girl's planners will probably cost more for me to print (I have a binding machine at home), but it will save me a lot of writing because it will be geared to our homeschooling and the sheets only took me an hour or two to design from scratch in Excel.

The girls do not study their specials each day, but I designed my planner in such a way that I could decide each week when we would put each subject in the daily schedule.

On the girls' pages, I included the books that they normally use everyday with a box to check them off.  For the subjects that have different pages assigned each day or particulars I need to write down, I put those subjects on my master teacher planner.  I am going to highlight the special for each day that they are to study and write any notes for them in the longest column on the right.

I thought I'd share these in case you've thought of making your own planner.  Using the Mom's Home Journal for my family forms book has given me a lot of ideas about how to make a useful form.  I thought I could share my planner ideas by posting these pictures.


The biggest problem I've found with planners over the past 6 years that I've used them is that they don't have the writing space where I've needed it.  I tried the Well-Planned Day (well intentioned, but it didn't have space for the number subjects I teach), Lakeshore's Teacher planner (the best by far), and three other planners.  I think I've used a different one every year!  But, I decided last week that it was time to make my own.  I'm pleased and excited to use what I've come up with.  I'm going to make them one quarter at a time, so that I can modify the checklists as needed if I make any changes to the curriculum as we go through the year.