Homeschool Student Planners

It's sort of funny, how I come back to the same things over and over. As I told you all on my homeschool website, I've used Pflaum Catholic Student Planners and been reasonably happy with them. They do the trick, have a few saints in them and the reference for the Gospel that week. DD 10 likes it, fine. Dd8, not so much. I've tried the kind with one week on a 2 page spread and no lines - she didn't like it (and I didn't like how much I had to rewrite things day after day "Practice Spelling Words", etc.) She preferred a weekly list. I was so proud of my diligent daughter who wanted something so grown-up as a concise goals sheet. Well..... the kid in her turned up last week. She was less than diligent. To help her along this week, and for the rest of the year as far as I'm concerned, I made up a 2-page spread weekly student planner in an Excel document. It's got 5 days as the header of the rows, although since Wednesday is our field trip, co-op day, it only has 2 lines as opposed to the other 5 days having 6 lines each. The 9 columns I created are for 1. Days of the week (really short column) 2. Math / Latin (they don't go together, they're just both short entries) 3. Religion 4. Language Arts 5. Science *then there's a page break* 6. History 7. Memory (we do lots of this) 8. Other (Piano, field trips, etc.) 9. Spelling words (this is a long column and takes up as much space as columns 1 & 2 put together). The Spelling Words has numbers running down the column to fill in the weekly spelling words.

Donna Young has some very specific examples and descriptions and options on her site. http://www.donnayoung.org/forms/planners/planner.htm

If you look at the sample pages of any of the student planners online, you get a great idea of what you want.

I typed in specific instructions for specific days that are recurring (Monday is always get new spelling words / Friday is always spelling test, etc.) There's a lot in our school that can't be planned too far in advance.

Science occured for 2 hours this morning and the kids kept asking for more throughout the day.

I'm pretty happy with the planner. We'll see what she thinks when she wakes up tomorrow....