My New & Improved Home Education Planner (With Downloadable Cover Art)

As we're wrapping up this school year and I plan for the next one, one step is making my planner to track our school days. You may remember My DIY-Planner from last year. It worked out really well for me so I used much of the same format when printing one for this coming school year, BUT I got a major upgrade for the cover! I love the artwork, complete with a couple Charlotte Mason quotes.

Isn't it lovely? The artist is Ally, a fellow home school mom in the Simply Charlotte Mason Facebook group. She shared it with the group saying that she thought a few other ladies might like to use it, and was kind enough to give me permission to post it on my site as a free download as well. I just love it! Thank you so much for sharing Ally!!!

To view or download Ally's Home Education 

Planner Cover, click the links below...

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

This is a free file for personal use. If you want to share it, please link to this post. Do not circulate it as your own, try to sell it, or link directly to the file. Obviously. Anyway, it looks just like mine except without the years typed on. I used photoshop (and Ally uses picmonkey) to add the year range on to it each year.

I made the tabs using this fun little tab punch, and stick them on with these tab stickers.

The inside of my planner starts with calendars from Calenderpedia...

Then Goals For the Year from Trina's Dynamite Homeschool Plus (she has TONS of cute, free planner printables)...

And next are our school day pages. I made a table in Microsoft Word to suit my purpose for this. (you can click the image to see it bigger if you want.)

I made the table in this format for a couple reasons:

• I tried to make it easy for my son to take care of his independent work... well... independently. At a glance, he can see his assignments by looking in the assignments column. We still do much of the school day together, but it's nice that he can stay on task doing school work when I'm not right there beside him. 
• I wanted to type out as much as possible so that I would be writing less in the book each day. In the boxes that have several choices, I'll just circle which one we actually did that day. 
• Our state's requirement is simply to do school for 180 days. Notice that I write in the school day at the top, as well as the date. This serves as my school records for the year. 

What about special days like co-ops or field trips, when we do something instead of the subjects listed? I fill in this box instead:

One page includes two regular school days as well as two special school days. This doesn't mean that every other day of school is a special day, it just means that when ever we have one I can jot down the date and school day number while keeping it in order with all our regular school days. The rest of the time I'll just skip over that little box. 

At the end of our school days section I also include an "End of the Year Flashback" for fun. (I downloaded it here.)

The last three sections are where I track our co-ops, field trips, and book log. Each one is just a basic table in Microsoft word. 

Last of all, I bind it with my fabulous Pro-Click binding machine.

Happy Planning! ~