Now is the season when homeschool / home education planning starts in earnest!
Planning is one of my favourite things, as you may know! I have probably tried all the planners there are!
I seem somehow to have managed to acquire 4, yes four, teacher planners for the 2015/2016 year, so I may do a giveaway at one point – watch this space 🙂
Although we don’t do it every year, we are planning to carry on through the summer this year as we have had so much disruption again this term with moving house. Our books are mostly still in storage, so I will share in another post what we’re using.
What I would like to do is shift to earlier bedtimes and earlier rising so we can start lessons early and finish early with a view to free afternoons outdoors while the weather is good. All of my children except the youngest now are teenagers, so that may take some convincing, but I’m going to try 🙂
Sorry I can’t post photos, as we still have no phone or internet so I am limited to what my mobile can cope with!
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The four I have this year are:
• an Erin Condren Teacher Planner which is personalised, so I won’t be giving that one away I’m afraid, sorry! (When it arrives, I’ll post a pic though) 😀 This really is the Rolls Royce of teacher planners! Expensive (although they’ve reduced shipping costs) but worth it because they are so sturdy and lovely to look at all year.
• The second is another American planner called the Teacher Anchor, which I forgot I ordered:
http://cjayneteach.bigcartel.com/product/teacher-anchortm-classroom-planner
This is a nice, sturdy planner, but not colourful like the EC. Really more suitable for school teachers than homeschool, with a bunch of Common Core info at the end, but certainly re-purposable (but they are all sold out this year),
• a British teacher planner from the Teacher Planner Company:
http://teacherplannercompany.co.uk/
(I ordered this before the EC but it hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m not sure what I’ll do with this one but it does have a very nice ruler) and finally,
• The ‘Holy Simplicity’ Catholic Homeschool Planner from:
http://www.allthesaintsbooks.com/holy-simplicity-planner.html
This was a downloadable file, which we printed and bound ourselves. This one is really beautiful, but I have to say I prefer the Well Planned Day planner ( http://hedua.com/cart/index.php/wpd.html ) which is also beautiful and has Bible verses whereas the Holy Simplicity planner has Catholic quotes. It’s a little bit wasted on me to be honest!
I might use it as a Prayer / Bible and Homemaking planner, as it has a nice monthly ‘Mary and Martha’ notes section for precisely those two things. I have had the WPD planner a couple of times, but it is an expensive option, and the shipping costs make it prohibitively expensive.
The other problem with American academic planners is that they don’t cover the same period as British planners – our ‘school year’ runs from September to July, whereas most American planners run from July or August to June, often even missing out July altogether, which is not much use if you do school all year round.
How is your homeschool planning going? Are you excited about the next year? What are you using? Are you a planner addict like me?
City Borg on the Prairie 