| I look forward to summer as a time to relax, and a chance to plan our homeschool year when I am unhurried and de-stressed. If you are like me, you’ll LOVE The Schoolhouse Planner! I have been using the planner all year, and have looked forward to the 2009-2010 planner ever since it was announced a few months ago. And my expectations were not disappointed… this year’s planner includes 374 pages, over 100 more than last year’s! It is packed full of great forms to help you organize your homeschool, homekeeping, family life and anything else you would ever need to plan. It also contains a wealth of great resources for your home and homeschool: recipes, timelines, teaching helps, and even a unit study for each month! Every month, the Schoolhouse store will offer a module that goes along with the unit theme for the month, and this year the modules will incorporate lapbooking! Right now, the Schoolhouse store is offering the planner and a full subscription to all the modules for 2009-2010, a value of $134.40, for just $99.99… a great deal! (And you know I love a great deal!) Get it here!
My favorite feature of the planner is that it is fully customizable and personalized to fit your unique needs. There are forms for everything, every style of homeschooling, and even just different versions of the same form. (For example, there are 3 menu planning forms: one weekly, one for a whole month of meals, and one with weekly plan and grocery shopping list all on one page.) This feature combined with the e-book format means that you can print out only the forms you choose for a completely individualized planner!
Technically speaking, the planner is simple to use and well designed. The download was very easy. I like to plan in front of my computer, where I can refer to my calendar and emails easily, so I love that I can have my planner open in a another window alongside what I am doing. I find it neater and easier to type my plan for the week than to write by hand, so I love that you can type right into the forms in this planner! This brings me to my one suggestion for improvement, which is the same as my request from last year: I would like to see a feature that allows for saving each form individually if you so choose once your purchase the planner. For example, I typed in yearly goals for one child and wanted to save it before I continued on to goals for my next child. However, my only choice was to print the form and then complete it again for the next child, losing the info I had typed for the first child. I worked around this by saving one planner for each child, but as the planner is so large, it takes up a lot of space, and it would have been easier to just save the goals form three times (one for each child). It seems to me like it would not be difficult to create a page where each form was a separate .pdf file that could be individually downloaded.
One other thing I love about this planner is that the pages are well designed. When I printed out my planner, it looked very nice and coordinated. I realize that this is just an asthetic thing, but I find I am more motivated to use a planner that is pretty than one that is not!
Overall, I applaud The Old Schoolhouse Store for creating such a well thought out, comprehensive planner. It will meet the needs of a great variety of homeschooling families, from unschoolers all the way to those who keep track of daily grades. Available from the Schoolhouse Store for $39, this planner is crammed with value-added features which will simplify, organize and enrich your homeschool! You can buy it or see a free preview here.
Happy Planning!
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