My Planner...

For the last several years, I have been taking other plan books and "planner pages" and tweaking them to try and find something that would work for us, with our home schooling.  I have used "plan books" I purchased at "Teacher Stores", in the US.  I have tried on-line planners and grade books.  And while they all had their positive points, none of them were exactly what I was needing, nor were they always inexpensive.

This year, I decided to try my hand at my own.  So I learned to work with Excel, and actually made a spreadsheet planner that fits our needs.  Now I'm a "pencil and paper" girl, so I just make the sheets and then print them out, for 1 term at a time. (We have broken our school year into 6, 7 week terms this year.  We only school 4 days a week, most weeks, so that is why we have added the 7th week. :-)  Here is a link to a pdf of my weekly plan book sheets, plan book page 1, plan book, page 2 .

I also have struggled with keeping some kind of "grade record".  We have tried as I mentioned above various different things, but this year, I also made "grade sheets for each child, and add grades daily to my "grade book".  Here is a link to a pdf of my grade book sheets, grade book sheet 1, grade book sheet 2, grade book, sheet 3 .

Since we do a form of "work boxes", (I call it our "work folders"), I have taken a free PDF download from the official Work Box site, and I tweaked it...color coding it for each child, and then typing in
the things that stay the same each week.  This has saved me tons of time. ;-)  The Work Folders hold anything that they can do independently.  They work through them during the day.  When I am ready to work with one or 2 of them, I just call them out to our table, and we work together, then when they return to their desk, they can pick up with their folders.   Here is a link to a pdf of my log sheet for our work folders, log sheet 1, log sheet 2 .

Hope you enjoyed the "peak" at my "plan book".    I am thinking of adding a couple pages to it  from a friend.  One that focuses on  my personal Bible study and prayer requests for the week.  I also think it would be good to add a monthly calendar for an over-view of what's going on in our lives.  I do have a "year at a glace" type of calendar at the front of my binder, but it would be nice to have something that I could actually make notes on, too.