How to Set Up a Planner
The best way I have found to organize lesson plans for each subject is with the same cheap and easy Scholastic Daily Planner notebooks that my mom used with us in the ‘90s and that I used as a classroom teacher in the ‘00s. There are fancier options out there, but these and flexible enough to meet all our needs. While you’re picking up planners, grab a handful of Frixion erasable pens. (Actually, grab a package for each kid, too. Our homeschool runs on erasable pens.)
Each child receives their own planner. I start by figuring out our school calendar. Since my husband is a professor, we try to align our school year to his, but as the kids have gotten older and participated in more classes and activities, our breaks don’t always match up. I start by pulling together all of the relevant calendars available and picking a start date, then I go through the year and find our 36 weeks of school.
I like the physical act of writing in the dates, because I can easily make notes of field trips, upcoming holidays, field trips, and school events, and I have a better sense than on a computer if a couple weeks are going to be pretty busy (and therefore need light school loads) or if we have a long series of uninterrupted weeks (which means I need to plan some extra activities for a change of pace).
I number our weeks (for a quick and easy sense of how far through the school year we are) and write out all of the subjects roughly in the order we do them throughout the day. Obviously your subjects may vary from mine.
In our family, Bible, history, science, art, music, and poetry are all done together, so I really only have to do the work of lesson planning in one kid’s planner, then I just easily transfer over the plans to everyone else’s. For some subjects, like math, spelling, grammar, and handwriting, we just do the next lesson each day, so I don’t write those out at the beginning of the year. At the start of the day (or the week), I’ll jot down the daily assignments so that the kids know their tasks and can check them off. For some subjects, like Latin, writing, and history, our curriculum is written by the week, so I plan out what chapter we should be on each week and build in catch-up weeks every quarter. Those subjects are planned out at the beginning of the year to make sure we get them completed by the end of the year.
One of the benefits of this system of lesson planning is that it doubles as my record keeping. I don’t keep used workbooks or most of our written work from year to year, but I do hang on to all of our planners. We’ve lived in a variety of states with differing rules for homeschooling over the nine years we’ve homeschooled, but I can absolutely tell you what we did for school in the second week in February when my son was in 2nd grade. Only once with a charter school in CA did a supervising teacher want to know exactly what we did in every subject, every day (that was overkill, and we left that school after that year), but I could tell her. I have a super supportive husband and grandparents who believe in what we’re doing, but for my friends with skeptical family members, it’s easy to pull out the planner and show that yes, the kids are learning a ton! And on the days when I feel like I’m failing, it helps to look back over the week and see that yes, the baby was puking all week and it felt like all I did was laundry and administer pedialyte, but the kids did actually watch the nature documentaries I had queued up for them, they did three solid days’ worth of math, and we listened to two quality audiobooks. We managed to accomplish a lot. Conversely, for a parent who feels like they’re doing enough, maybe looking back and seeing that only creative writing got done all week might be a sign that priorities need to be shifted so that the kids are getting through their core subjects. Even if no one but you ever sees your kids’ planners, they’re a valuable record of your homeschool accomplishments.
And now that I have a record of what my oldest did each year, it’s super easy to plan for his sisters in subsequent years. We do history and science on a five year cycle, so I put a lot of time into planning out those subjects the first time around, but now that we’re into our second time through, I literally just open up my son’s planner from five years ago and copy over my plans from last time, adjusting for different books/library accessibility this time around. (We didn’t have hoopla or a smart phone last time we did the Greeks and Romans, so I have a lot more audiobook and streaming documentary resources now.) So yes, it might feel like it’s taking time to set things up the first time around, but if you have it all in your planner, most of the work is done for the next time through the grade/subject.
