Homeschool Planning

The past few weeks we have been chatting about homeschool planning. We talked about how simply buying yet another planner was not going to solve anyone’s problems. Last week I shared how measuring the success of our plans by if we completed everything or not is actually the wrong tactic to take. This week, I…

We tend to have a lot of philosophical military conversations around here. Things like the ethics and value of counterinsurgency (See Consider This by Karen Glass to know why we got off on that tangent one day.) So recently I asked the husband (long-time National Guard officer) what he thought about this quote from Dwight…

Hey, I get it. I love planners myself. I have the billion colored pens, disc-bound pages, bullet journals, stickers, washi — all of it. Planners are just plain fun. And it is easy to get caught up in the fun of making a homeschool planner. It’s also easy to look for a solution to your…

How many homeschool planners have you bought that are gathering dust? They never made it more than a couple of months into the school year. That was me too until I figured out that instead of buying a planner, I needed to print one instead. So I’m here today with five reasons why it’s better…

As you begin to plan your homeschool year, it is tempting to dive right into curriculum options and weekly plans. Unfortunately, this approach often leads to frustration when our choices don’t help our children achieve their goals or the materials don’t actually suit our family’s style. Before diving into the details, we suggest that you…

Let’s start with a misconception about year-round homeschooling. It is typically NOT homeschooling all the time. Just because we are year-round homeschoolers that doesn’t mean we are doing more school than your average students. Traditional American school schedules begin in late August, take a couple of weeks off in December, and continue through the end…

This is the time of year that homeschooling moms begin to gather ideas, inspiration, and resources for the next school year. One of the best ways to discover ideas that truly work is to talk to other homeschooling moms. We’ve gathered some of those great ideas from several homeschooling moms and shared them below. You’ll…

Ah, summer. The time for swimming pools, cookouts, camp, and getting your house in order. Yep. I said that last one. It is tempting to shut down during the summer and only focus on fun (actually, it is really good to do quite a bit of that) but summer is also a great time to…

I was never going to be one of those people. You know the ones, those Happy Planner people. What was that thing anyway? Three big boxes for each day? What would I ever use that for? No lines, no nicely divided subject areas for my homeschool planner. The thing was useless as far as I…

Last winter my third grader, Sarah Joan, and I were so frustrated with homeschool and each other. I had tried several systems, including the spiral notebook system, to no avail. She still wasn’t independently task driven, and I was still falling behind giving her assignments. Being a bit of a day dreamer, she also had…