Our Homeschool Plan & Planner Excerpt
An excerpt from our Homeschool Planner
Our Home Education Plan
Homeschooling is Easy When You Have a Good Plan
I had decided when I became pregnant with my first that we were going to homeschool and God convicted me to do so when she was ready for Kindergarten even when the “fear” tried to convince me otherwise. We looked at other school options such as Christian schools, Montessori schools, and other options, but I managed to follow through with what I knew God wanted me to do. Everywhere I turned I “heard” God telling me to homeschool. Coincidentally our first “official” day of school was 9/11/01, so that really cemented it in for us, and we never looked back.
Sample Biography Pages from the Awesome Homeschool Planner.
At first I documented of every single thing – hours, days, everything that was “educational” – because I thought I had to, along with having set curriculum for every single subject. But, fortunately I was wrong and saw the error of my ways, because if I had kept up the way I was going I would have never made it past the 2nd or 3rd child. We have since become extremely eclectic in our curriculum, but still leaning towards a classical style, and also keep our schedule very flexible -which is more doable with a small bunch of different grade levels and interests.
Planning for your homeschool can be a lot of fun with the right attitude and, of course, the Right Planner!
We homeschooled in Pennsylvania for 12 years, so that’s part of the reason I had gotten into the needless habit of over-planning and over record keeping – because it’s such a “tough” state. I was stressing over all the pages and forms I had to have ready for the school and I didn’t know how I was going to keep up with more kids coming along, especially the twins. I had been gradually lessening our portfolio thickness over the years, but I still felt like I was skimping or somehow doing something wrong because I wasn’t showing enough.
Portfolio Cover sample pages from the Awesome Homeschool Planner.
Then one year my evaluator had gotten sick and needed surgery so I was forced to find a new one – fear stricken I did – oh no! Now I’m really going to have to do more paperwork to prove I’m a good mom-teacher!
I’m sure that the whole thing was God’s plan, because it turned out my new evaluator was the nicest person on earth, knew the state law inside and out and actually opened my eyes to what it really says – told me to stop stressing over trying to prove I was doing a good job.
We ended up taking our 4″ binders that we used to turn in for portfolios and shrunk them down to a single folder with no more than 10 pages, and I found I only needed 2 forms to turn in – the book list and the paper from the evaluator. Wow, and I had been turning in a log of 180 days, making sure I was covering every day, every subject… blah, blah -you name it! I never felt so foolish, but at the same time relieved at the great burden that had been lifted!
But in the process, not only did I learn a lot, I also found that I actually do like to plan things out somewhat detailed (but for myself) and have it for reference as we go through. All the sudden the papers that I stressed over because I had to fill them out became enjoyable and not detailed enough because now I was doing it for myself and I look forward to it. No, we do not always get to everything I plan when I plan it to be done, so we simply carry it over. Doing this we also weeds out what’s really important for us to learn and don’t do school just for the sake of it.
