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| Courtesy of flickr.com |
August is here and that usually means it's Back-To-School time. Am I right? Everyone is rushing around to get that last little bit of summer vacation in and heading to buy school supplies and getting prepared for another school year. It's almost like that in our house. Except, as most of you know, we homeschool. So things are just slightly different.
- We are able to grab our school supplies when they go on sale after public school has started.
- We can choose whatever we want and need. No worries about grabbing specific colors and brand names.
- We probably already have it from last year and therefore, can save money and not have to buy it again.
- We don't have to go grade specific and can work at our own pace. This one I love! Because my daughter needs a higher grade level for her spelling while a lower grade level for her math so she can do just that while staying on point.
- We can take off the days we need without any worry of missing any work or trying to catch up.
These are just a few things, but there are many more that I could keep on adding to this list. But one thing about homeschooling is that you have to keep up with your state laws on what is needed to homeschool. I live in a state where it is more relaxed. But that doesn't mean I am a lazy homeschooling mom or take it lightly. In fact, my daughter sometimes gets mad that I'm more strict with her than when she was in public school. But I don't see it as a bad thing.
One thing though my state does require is a log of hours. We must keep and record all of our hours and have a total of 1000 hours by the end of the school year. 600 of those hours must be core hours {Science, Math, Language Arts, Social Studies} and the other 400 can be non-core or other core hours.
But I was having a hard time finding a planner that would record our hours and keep them neatly with our lessons. Our first year homeschooling, I made a simple sheet that had the date, subject, lesson, and the number of minutes we did. I then added those up each month. Our second year, I went the digital route and used an online planner. I really liked this because it was the only online planner I could find that allowed you to input hours. But it did not calculate them and sometimes, it got a bit much to keep clicking on every single subject and trying to figure out the minutes to write down and add up.
So this year, I decided I needed to just create my own planner. One that would work with us. I first attempted to look at several planners but there were so many pages in them that I wouldn't use or I liked, but wish were slightly different. I wanted something secular, which was a bit hard to find as well.
So I had no choice but to create one to my needs. And that is what I did. I jumped on the computer and decided it was time to put my designing notions in gear and create one from scratch. And now, I loved it so much, I'm making it available to all of you.
So here it is! The debut of my own personal homeschool planner that allows you to easily keep track of hours and assignments and other plans. However, if you don't need to track hours, you can choose not to use that portion and just use the planner as is.
It is a basic and simple planner. It doesn't have a bunch of home planning and meal planning and organizational things which I know most homeschool planners do and that is awesome. But I wanted to keep mine simple and to just school. You can see more of a preview and purchase the digital files on TeachersPayTeachers.
I was so excited that I ran to Staples and the UPS store and had it printed off and bound there. Now I have a hard copy to start filling in for our school year approaching fast. I can't tell you how excited I am to use my planner. I thin this will really help me stay on track, while being able to record everything I need to a bit easier.
