Journal of a Busy Mom

living one day at a time

How to Create a Customized Homeschool Planner

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I love homeschool planners. They look so pretty on my desk, ready to be filled with goals and lesson plans. Recently, that is all they have been good for-looking pretty.

It’s not their fault. It’s not that they are not worthy to be written in and used up. In fact up until last year, I used my planner faithfully. Until something changed-my circumstances.

Last year, was the first year my daughter basically flew solo. I didn’t really have to write out lesson plans for her. I used to write out her plans for every subject, but as she did more and more online classes, I was needed less and less. I also stopped doing Together Time (like Morning Time) where I would read aloud to both kids and do a subject together like Bible Study or Character Study. So I didn’t need to plan that out either.

I was just my son and I. So I ended up just writing it into his planner. So my beautiful, very costly planner, did not get used.

Honestly, it had more than I really needed. It was filled with all kinds of nice worksheets but ones that were not going to work for me.

So this year, I decided to make my very own planner.

I have several blogs that I follow that have AMAZING planners you can download, but like all the others, they also have items I don’t need, so I took some from here and there and organized it how I wanted it. I also bought a cheap set of dividers and cut them down to size to match the planner size.

Cheap dividers for planner
Cheap dividers for planner

Then took it to Office Depot to get bound together. The grand total at Office Depot was around $9.

First I picked a pretty cover from Plan Your Year from edsnapshots.com Followed by our school year plan and my states requirements (I think its a nice thing to have handy).

My Cover Page
My Cover Page

 

Section 1: Calendars

  • School Year Round planning schedule-I love this planning schedule. I shared here. So that is the first thing in this section.
Our 2016-17 school year
Our 2016-17 school year
  • 12 month calendar- I downloaded FiveJs.com free planner (she has over 200 pages in it)
  • My Weekly Schedule planner- also from Five Js.
  • Attendance Log-There are so many to choose from. Edsnapshots and Five J’sboth have one and so many others do too. I chose one that fits my style.

Section 2: Goals and Curriculum

  • Goals for the Year. Again, there are several out there. I know both Edsnapshots and Five Js has one. I ended up picking one from Tinas Dynamic Homeschool Plus. I like how it had Homeschool Goals, Personal Goals, Health Goals and Spiritual Goals.
  • Curriculum Resources-basically this is our course of study outline with what each of them is doing this year. There are several variations of this one on the web.
  • Curriculum prices and needs-both of these are from FiveJs.
  • Materials loaned and borrowed-also from Five Js.
  • Field trip Planner and Log- Five Js
  • Books to Read Aloud- also from Five Js.

Section 3: Weekly Glance

This is the section where my weekly plans would have gone. In the past, I had both kids on my planner and I specified what each one of them would do. As I shared, this no longer works for us. So this section will be my Weekly Planning with notes on what things I need to accomplish with them or for them. This is from Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus. I made 18 back to back copies.

Week at a glance
Week at a glance

Section 4: Morning Time

When I told my friend about Morning Time she laughed at me and said “do your kids sit on carpet squares too”. She must not understand Morning Time. I first heard the phrase from Edsnapshots. I am planning to write more about this topic later, so for now I will just share what is in this section.

  • Morning Time Agenda- what we will do each day for 45 minutes
  • Goals for the Morning Time-this one comes from a book called How to Home School by Gayle Graham.
  • Six-week term planner-this is from Donnayoung.org. This is the spot I will plan our Learning Periods for Morning Time. In this section I plan out each day for 6 weeks. We homeschool year round and I break up my year in 6 week Learning Periods.
A six week plan
A six week plan

Section 5: Notes

This last section holds 5 pages for notes. I am using the Plan Your Year Notes page from Edsnapshots.com.

To Wrap up, I’ve created MY ideal planner, I hope scouring these amazing websites will prompt you to create yours.

Here they are again:

edsnapshot.com

fivejs.com

Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus.com

donna young.org (this is a really really good site. I just was on there yesterday and some of her things now require a membership)

Ligia

More on this topic:

Homeschool Calendar 2016-17

My Grocery Budget Revamp

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Grocery Makeover Challenge, am I up to it? 
groceries
I am participating in a Grocery Makeover Challenge sponsored by 5 Dollar Dinners so that I can revamp our grocery budget. As I have shared before, I am challenged with two very big hits to our grocery budget. The first one being that we are gluten free. That in itself is huge. Here is a small example: A one pound package of spaghetti may cost you .79 on sale. My gluten free pasta is $1.88 on sale. Basically almost 3 times the price. The second challenge is we switched to a paleo diet. That is HUGE. The true paleo diet is ALL organic, non GMO, organic meat, dairy, fruit, veggies, etc. That basically added about $200-$400 to my monthly budget.

So thanks to this grocery challenge, I am taking baby steps to getting my grocery budget under control. Baby step one, was actually getting down and dirty and deciding what is a good budget for me. For my family of four, with the issues I face, and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I decided on $1,100.

This number is loosely based on the numbers suggested by the United States Department of Agriculture.

For a family of four on a “moderate plan” which is what I considered mine to be, it says $1070 so I rounded it up to $1,100.

Another method I have used to get a good idea what my budget should be is by saving my receipts for a month and then adding them all up.  You can then compare that to the numbers on the  USDA recommendation or use Dave Ramsey’s suggestion of 5-15%, but that includes all food (dining out too).

What I plan to do with my budget is continue to work on shaving some of that down. I would like to try shaving off 10% every 4 weeks by using coupons, sales ads, etc until I get down to around $860 which is the “thrifty” category on the USDA recommendation. I’ve been slacking off with this method even though I know it works. So can I save $110 this month? I sure hope so.

I want to share a link to a grocery budget series I’ve done in the past. Its by Don’t Waste the Crumbs she has a great article and worksheets.

Here is the link to the current challenge I am doing Grocery Budget Makeover.

My Top 3 Curriculum Websites

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As I Spring Forward into the 2016-17 year, I wanted to share the top 3 curriculum websites that I look at for my curriculum.  Most of my choices are centered around what classes my children take at our homeschool co-op and the classes they will take on Landry Academy. So, recently I don’t have much curriculum to choose on my own. As I shared in Review of Curriculum Choices 2015-16, there are certain curriculums that I will stick to. For the most part I will only need to chose 2-3.

My Top 3 Sites:

  1. Homeschool Classified– I have shared about this place before because it is my favorite place to shop for curriculum. It is an online homeschool site that sells mostly used but some new curriculum. I sell my curriculum there too (see my listings here)
  2. Christian Books Distributors (CBD)-They have an amazing homeschool section. They have sales on Apologia all the time and free shipping. Not everything is Christian based, so you can find things like Teaching Textbooks, Explode the Code, etc
  3. Amazon-I have found many different gems on Amazon. I usually buy our novels on Amazon. Landry Academy makes it easy for me and they link their books to Amazon so all I have to do is look them up.

Sometimes I will just go straight to the company website and purchase on their site. I find that sometimes their prices are just the same as those on the other sites so I like to get it right from the source if I can (just in case). For the most part, these three sites are my go-to sites.

Ligia

Related Posts:

Review of Curriculum Choices 2015-16

Spring Forward: Planning for 2016-17