Homeschool Planner

Like so many of you, I have spent a lot of time trying to find that perfect homeschool planner. I have watched tons of videos and spent hours researching the best planner, hoping that it will finally help me get my homeschool organized and on track. I start every school year with the intention of keeping a really well-done planner so we have records, and every year I fail. In the past, I have tried every kind of paper planner out there. I have had Erin Condren planners, Happy Planners, and every other version you can imagine. None of them worked for very long or consistently. I would always get off track and find myself weeks later trying to remember what we did so I could write it down. I guess now would be the time to mention that I am more of a write it down after than a plan beforehand kind of person. I don’t have any crazy curriculum that needs a ton of planning. Mostly we just do the next lesson so I don’t really need a ton of pre-planning. After many years of failing with paper planners, I started this year out looking for an online planner. I was hoping an online planner would work for me since the paper ones were not. After a little looking around I settled on the Well Planned Gal’s online homeschool planner. It is a subscription-based planner, but it is worth it for me. I have to say so far I LOVE it! If you are the kind of person who likes to pre-plan everything and have a full schedule to follow this planner works for that. This planner also works great for people like me who like to sort of plan from behind or keep track of what was done. I will say there was a bit of a learning curve and I made a few adjustments to make it fit what I needed, but now that I have it tweaked I think it’s great. I added all of our courses for the year, told it how many times a week we wanted to do them, and then I simply check them off for the day. You can print off a schedule for your students for the week, and one for yourself with all the assignments if that is something you want to do. One of the best parts is that it tracks other things for me, like attendance. If we check all of our boxes for the day it counts that as a school day and I have an attendance tracker without having to remember to fill out another form. There is also a place to easily add grades and then it will make me a progress report. On Fridays, after we have finished school I can sit down and make sure everything is checked off for the week and then print out a schedule of everything we did for our records. I put this printout in our binders with our weekly saved work. It’s really easy to go back into the program and add things like field trips, changes to assignments, and even notes on exactly what we did. It is pretty customizable to what you need or want it to be. The Well Planned Gal online planner has been one of the best changes I have made to our homeschool ever. I don’t see this being something that changes anytime soon. If you want to check it out here is the link to the website https://sso.wellplannedgal.com/login-in-mwpd.php?act=hedua&trail=1. They even have a 30-day free trial if you want to try it out. Now I just need a version of this for my everyday life!