I was so well prepared for this school year.
In August.
I had spent so much of the summer planning and list making, evaluating curriculum for each child and writing out a plan of what to accomplish. I was confident that this was going to be a great school year. Then, of course (some of you can see this coming), I found out that I was pregnant. Right as our school year was getting off to a start, I was tired, tired, tired. My well-laid plans would have been completely thrown off for the year, except that I had the best digital homeschool planner ever.
Now, I am a paper person. I still use paper planners for other purposes, and I print my plans for the week out and clip it on a clipboard that I use throughout the day. I love notebooks, pens, and paper books. But I was frustrated with the time it took to hand-write my children’s assignments along with the fact that I had a deep desire to plan out the entire year and be able to review what is coming up easily.
Reflecting on this year, what made a WORLD of difference in our homeschooling was Homeschool Planet. I tried out the free trial for the first month, but then I made the purchase. After all I had spent (even with the awesome deals that I found on Ebay and Facebook groups) on curriculum, what good is it if we struggle to implement and use it?
With Homeschool Planet, I have actually planned our homeschool year out and then each week it is ready for me to review and check off what we have completed. Next, I just print out a check list for myself and each of my students to be ready for Monday. It used to take me hours to write out checklists by hand previously and try to go through each lesson book to see what was completely manually.
This meant, that many weeks, especially with an infant and toddlers needing me, or when in first trimester pregnancy, I didn’t get the checklists written out for my older students. We still got through things okay, with my older ones just moving to the next lesson in the book. But I had no way of easily tracking how much work they were actually completing and being confident of the amount of time we were taking on one subject. It was easy to get behind, or feel behind, because it was not simple to evaluate. Many times, I would find out later that my kids were skipping certain books.
When I tried to plan farther in advance on paper, you know what would happen: someone gets sick, life happens, or a certain subject needs more time spent on it, and then, bam!, the dates and lessons no longer match. But now I have Homeschool Planet in my life.
I can schedule in a book that I want us to complete together, enter the amount of pages, what days of the week I want to use, and ta-da! Homeschool Planet makes auto lessons for me. I can enter in a recurring pattern for IEW, Math-U-See, my own math drill routines, A Year of Playing Skillfully for my preschooler, or a Veritas Reading Comprehension Guide and choose a date I want it completed by, and ta-da! I have a plan for the lessons proportioned throught the year.
When I want to add more detail, I can easily go in and add more details or web links to the specific days. I can assign chapter books, Life of Fred, or Abeka language and phonics books by designating a chapter or lesson to certain days of the week. I can add Morning Basket plans. I can add Exploring Nature with Children lessons with the links embedded directly to the art and poetry for the week (just click from the iPad).
And if we don’t get to it, because life happens or one student needs more time on one subject?
I can bump assignments up individually, as a group, reschedule or cancel! With just the click of a button, my plans for the entire year are not wrecked, but still organized and not loading me with overwhelm!
If I set up my classes for grades and tracking, I can also easily print a transcript or report card for each student. It puts my mind at ease to know that I am also recording my children’s work simply while I am keeping my planner.
Wait. That is not it. Seriously. Homeschool Planet also has a marketplace where you can purchase pre-made lesson plans from top publishers such as Math-U-See, BJU Press, Apologia, Veritas, Mystery of History, and many others. With these, set up is even faster. One free lesson plan of your choice is included with the 30-day free trial!
Back in August, yes, in some subjects we still got behind on less necessary subjects and not off to as strong a start as I had hoped for. But my oldest kids were kept right on track with their subjects because all I had to do was print out the checklist each week instead of writing everything out by hand. My kids, my husband, and I knew exactly what needed to be accomplished each day. For anything I didn’t get to, I just bumped it up a couple weeks. When I felt better, we caught up on history lessons or moved some forward to later in the year. The beauty of it is: I KNOW exactly where we are in each subject. I don’t have the nagging feeling of not knowing. I can look ahead a few weeks or a few months to see what we will be studying at any point.
Homeschool Planet is not a magic pill. You still have to put in the cheerful work of teaching your students and tracking their progress. When I first started using Homeschool Planet, I skipped a couple weeks logging into the program and I had to take the time to re-adjust the check off boxes. Since then, I have made it a Friday or Saturday routine to check off our progress, adjust what is necessary, and print out lists for Monday. But I feel like I have my own secretary. I have felt more free mentally this year to spend more time teaching and in one-on-one with my children. And that, my friends, is rather magical.
Note: the links to Homeschool Planet are affiliate links. I have used Homeschool Planet personally before ever becoming an affiliate. Show a girl some love and help make this blog worth my time: use the link, pretty please!