Today's entry will be a review of a fantastic product created by the makers of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine (TOS). 

The Schoolhouse Planner is a digital planning book of 247 pages, chock-full of helpful, useful information, forms, and inspiration.  It is such a large document, and so full of so many wonderful things, that I will have a hard time telling you about all of them... Your eyes will start to gloss over dreamily...  And best of all, it is a PDF document, but you can type in it and SAVE the changes you have typed into it!  You will see why this is so wonderful as I tell you about it.

• Articles:  So far I have read inspirational articles on teaching math, the importance of teaching foreign languages, and how to use unit studies.  Articles I am still looking forward to reading on teaching Geography, Solving Science Struggles, communication, "Hands-on" History, Chore Training Tips, how art enriches our lives, and Homeschooling through High School.
• Recipes:  The Planner is divided into months of the school year, with a two-page-spread calendar for each month which can be printed (pages back-to-back) and put into your 3-ring Planning Notebook.  Between each month there are, among other things, yummy recipes for you to try out.
• There are information pages on famous composers and artists, countries and capitals, the Periodic Table, United States and state capitals, U.S. Presidents and their wives, a history timeline, 7 Wonders of the Ancient World and of the Modern World, important U.S. documents (such as the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, etc.). 
•  Forms:  This is where the type and save feature is really wonderful!  The Planner has in it so many, many wonderful forms.  There are forms for annual plans, yearly goals, curriculum planning, courses of study, a twelve-year planning page, recording sheets for curriculum recording, yearly grades, daily grades, progress reports, crafts completed, and on and on.  For the 12 year planning pages, you can add to it/adjust it each year.  The other forms can be filled in and saved, and reused each year, enterring the changed information for each new year.
• There are pages for descipleship records, Bible reading and memorization records, audio/video re and book reading logs, field trip planning, nature journal pages, Science lab sheet pages, and website and vendor information pages.  There are actually also resource recommendation pages in each month's section throughtout the entire Planner.
• There are pages to comple important personal information such as phone number and addresses of contacts, information for babysitters, family health records, schedules and reminders of homekeeping chores for mom and for kids, daily and family chore charts, many different formats for chore charts. There are pages for budgeting, financial inventory, gift budget, prayer journal, Bible reading, important dates to remember, garden plans and checklist, inventory of major appliances and electronics.  There are pages for keeping track of things borrowed or loaned, vacation plans, pet health visits, agift wish lists, and on and on. 
  

Improvements I would suggest for the creators to make to The Schoolhouse Planner:

• Table of Contents:  I would like to see the Table of Contents linked to the rest of the document so that when the reader points the cursor to an item in the TOC, one point and click would take the person immediately to the desired page.
• Table of Contents, again: The contents is listed by order, but page numbers are not given, so I have to scroll through the entire document to find out where something is and I can't just enter the page number into the top of the form where there is a nice little feature to do just that to get to the page you want...
• Two-page calendar spread: It would be very helpful if page two of each spread said somewhere, even in very faint print, what month it went to.  Repeatedly I am second guessing if my printer has messed me up, as I try to make sure that page one of November is on the back of page two of October, etc.
• Calendar (again): I would like to see the calendar pages presented in a changeable format, so that this resource can truly be used year after year. In other words, the place where it indicates on a calendar that August 14th, for instance, is a Thursday, should be typeable so that next year it could be changed and used to have the dates for August of 2009.

Overall, while this was a long, yet brief, overview, I just want to say what an awesome resource this is.  For it's price, I personally would have appreciated having a hard copy given to me with a compact disk included, which would have the pdf document on it.  I'm not a super computer whiz, so I don't know if a document that size would fit on a disk in pdf format, but it was just a thought.

So, everyone, go to The Schoolhouse E-Store and download the free sample pages to peruse, and think about investing in the wonderful resource for your homeschool (link below):

http://www.theoldschoolhousestore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=145&products_id=2629

Diana