Customized Homeschool Plan Book

I started our homeschool year fulling intending to use a plan book I had picked up at a thrift store. However, after one week using My Father's World curriculum, I realized that plan book just wasn't going to work. It didn't have enough spaces, and it wasn't set up in a logical order (for me).

So I decided to create a customized plan book ... again. I did it when my son was in kindergarten, too, but I had to add more details to this one since I now have my daughter added to the mix. My inspiration came from a teacher in a regular school who made her own customized planner.

I took her cue and added in all the details I usually have to write in day after day. I thought I'd share it with you today.

I made the cover from an old calendar image. The paper was flimsy, so I mounted it onto one-half of a file folder. To keep it looking and wearing nice all year, I added a transparency to the front of it for protection. Since my transparency was printable in my inkjet printer, I also added the year to the transparency.

Here's the main body of the plan book, showing one week at a glance. We school from Tuesday through Saturday, so I was finally able to change it and avoid the confusion of having to look at "Monday - Friday" and trying to remember where we were.

I've simply deleted my kids' names for privacy, but those black boxes do contain each child's name. I laid it out in the exact order that we do things each day. While I'm working with my daughter, my son does seatwork. While I'm working with my son, my daughter does her seatwork.

You may also notice that I've already typed in things like "Lang", "LS" and "Spelling" under these headings. It saves me a lot of writing, and those are the main subjects that we have seatwork in each day. I've never thought of doing this before, but now I love it!

I included my grade book at the back, and I used another one-half of a file folder for the divider page. I decorated the edge with what was leftover from the cover image.

Here is the actual grade book. It makes so much more sense (at least to me) to do it this way when you have only one child in each grade.

I have grade book pages for each of my kids.

I reused heavy cardboard (non-corrugated) for the back cover and then bound it with my Bind It All.

I love it!