I absolutely love planners!! There is just something about writing things down on paper that makes my heart happy!! I tend to stay much more organized when I have physically written something down.
Anyways, the planner I love most and have used for the past three years is made by Confessions of a Homeschooler. You can find her planner HERE. Erica has really put it together so wonderfully and I love that I can pick and chose what to use in my planner and put it together to my liking. This year I decided to add dividers and tabs to each month. I used some heavy duty black cardstock bought from Hobby Lobby for each divider, and some fun scrapbook papers for the tabs. Pink for 2016, blue for 2017….and don’t forget the washi tape!!!
My two older boys’ lesson plans are used for the main portion of the planner. I did need some extra room to write down all the plans for their science and history, so made a simple printable and stapled it over Saturday and Sundays slots. Super easy and I am still able to access those days if needed. My preschooler gets the entire “Notes” section where I have divided it up until Monday thru Friday slots.
Lastly, I took my planner to Staples to have it spiral bound. I couldn’t be happier!!
Thanks for stopping by!!
The Real Housewife of Spokane Valley 
I absolutely love this planner…cute and functional too!!
I am wondering about how you do your lesson planning…do you use a set curriculum or do you come up with all of your own lessons or do you do something else?? We started our first year of homeschool this year and all three of our girls are in different grades…it gets a bit overwhelming at times, so I try to get as much advice/tips/tricks/ideas as I can from other homeschool moms!
Thank you for sharing your classroom and your planner inspirations with us!! 🙂
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Kristen,
I am so happy to hear you are homeschooling!! Congrats!!
Our first two years we went through several different curriculums until we found what fit for the boys. So that itself can get a little overwhelming. Don’t be afraid to dump something that isn’t working for your girls. As for my lesson planning…I use a hodge podge of different things. Math (Teaching Textbooks), English (Easy Grammar) and Spelling (Spelling Workout) I use a set curriculum we follow. I will look on Teacher’s Pay Teachers for some fun activities around holidays. For example, the boys wrote a paper on how to sell a Haunted House for Halloween. For Math I found some fun “color grids” with multiplication or whatever I needed to reveal a fun image. My 11 year old LOVES those!! History and Science I do use a combination of Abeka and Scott Foresman. They answer the questions in the book. On certain subjects I will again go to TPT and find a unit study to go more in depth about the topic. For example…The Civil War. I found a great unit!! Or, The Pilgrims and Wampanoug People for Thanksgiving. Science I will scour YouTube for a good documentary that goes along with what they are learning as well. Hopefully this helps a little bit!! What grade levels are the girls in? I can direct you to some of my favorite resources!!
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Oh my gosh, that helps more than a little bit!! I had wanted to get together with you for coffee and homeschool talk before we moved, but life had different plans! 🙂
Our oldest, Taeryn, is in 4th grade and using Monarch’s online curriculum. She likes it a lot, but also loves time with her sisters as a “class”.
My middle, Zoey, is 2nd grade and our youngest, Brooklyn, is in kindergarten. For them, I have just been scouring Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers for ideas, and have been piecing things together.
I feel like I’m starting to get some really good resources that work for us, but I’m a planner… I need to know exactly what we are doing each day and have something that helps me know for sure that I’m teaching them what they need to know. I’m able to get creative and think outside the box once I know what we have to get done, if that makes sense. And I’m trying to remember that I’m jumping into homeschooling with 3 kiddos in different grades and to show myself grace because it’s all a learning process… But it still gets pretty overwhelming! 🙂
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The first year or two of homeschooling is definitely overwhelming, but I promise it will get easier. You will find something that works for you and your girls and things will just flow. I totally understand being a planner. I too need to know exactly how my weeks are planned otherwise its pure chaos!!
For your youngest two check out The Moffatt Girls on TPT. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Moffatt-Girls They have Monthly No-Prep packets that are absolutely AMAZING!!! They are only $6 a month, or you can by all 12 months at a discount. Anyways, they have Preschool to 2nd grade. Definitely check out their store!!
As for your 4th grader, it’s wonderful she loves her curriculum!! There is also great stuff out there you can print out for her so she can do some hands on worksheets so she feels more “part of the class”.
If you are ever back over this way let me know and I would love to get together with you!! Hope you all are doing well!!
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Now that we are a few months into our first year, we are finding that we need to modify our curriculum, so I’m looking into some of the other options you suggested. Do you use the CD-ROM’s with the Teaching Textbooks?? Or do you feel like the workbook does a good enough job on its own??
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No, I do not use the CD-Rom’s with Teaching Textbooks. The book itself has a good explanation of each lesson and I’ve found I don’t need the CD’s quite yet. That will probably change once we get into the upper highschool grades, but for now I like that textbooks alone. You can see more of a peek inside the textbooks in my “How I Lesson Plan” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmKzPsufPkk
Hope that helps!!!
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