Here’s My Plan…on Planning

So, I originally figured out the entire school year for both kids. But I did that the first year…and the second year. Not that those were bad years but they definitely didn’t go as planned. Well, I didn’t just ditch my plans altogether, I just altered how I implement. This year, in an effort to continue Lee’s independent learning and to start Fox more on that path, I purchased planners for all three of us. I posted about my planner already. I actually preordered both mine and Lee’s High School Planner (4 years) at the same time. I wanted to find a similar planner for Fox but at the time I ordered ours, I didn’t see a more ‘boy’ planner. Fortunately, not long later, I did find one from Home Educating Family Publishing. So here are the kids’ planners:

 

Lee’s is a full size (8.5x11) with 340 pages and Fox’s is 6x9 with 180 pages.

Lee’s has much more in it than does Fox’s but I think he would just be overwhelmed if he had one like that. Lee was quite overwhelmed when she first got hers. It has tips for college planning, keeping records, credit hours, subjects, requirements for college admission (basic, you’d need to check out the particular college of interest for more information) and quite a bit more. You can see more of her planner here. When the book is open flat, there are two weeks visible. She has chosen to use just one column for assignments and the second column for ‘other’ things (chores, expectations, paper route).

This is her first year of really planning her own weeks. She did attempt it last year (successfully, I might add). Here is what she will be going off of to plan. I will also be helping her until she gets it down on her own.

Fox is more basic with a weekly layout as well as a month at a glance. Have a look at the planner he has here. There is a full page layout for notes alone. So at the end (or they have it at the beginning, I would choose to use it after) of each month we can record what worked well and what needs an adjustment. The link will take you to a virtual planner, you can preview the entire 180 planner.

There are boxes to check off (or as he likes to do, fill them in- completely) as they are done. For the first week I actually wrote in all his work for each day on it’s own line. For the coming weeks, he will be filling in the days on his own (well, not on his own really, we will go over all that is to be done in the week). I have put together a very simple chart for him us to use when planning his weeks. I did learn from last year (or was it the first year?) to only plan out each week in detail (as in page numbers).

This is for the first 12 weeks plan. It will have to be altered a bit for the second 12 weeks and the third 12 weeks. And yes, I customize the font for each child- the one that they like more. Fox likes Chiller and Lee likes Papyrus.

And to keep one final bit of tracking (because sometimes one of us will miss something and then no one knows what was done), I have both of their daily assignments in my planner and then I check it off when I have made sure that is has been completed. This way it makes sure that if one forgets to mark a subject done (or if they happen to forget to do the assignment somehow) it won’t get over-looked. You can see a preview of the planner here.

And that’s my plan…on planning. We are all a bit of planners but not follow-through-ers so here’s to working extra hard to make sure it all works