How We Homeschool: Record Keeping

I mentioned before that I tend to over plan (major understatement) and due to that our whole school year was thrown off, pretty much from day one. For this year I had created weekly schedule pages with areas for each subject and wrote in the activities we would complete. Once they were completed I would just check them off. This worked for approximately two weeks.
At Christmas, a mere three months into the school year, I redid all of those minutely detailed schedules for a fresh start in the new year. Once again it lasted only a couple of weeks, and I finally trashed the whole thing out of frustration.

I came across this awesome website via Pinterest and decided it was worth checking out. These lovely ladies offer a free (!) customizable (!) planner that you can print offline. I loved it at first sight. There are plenty of options to make it work for you. I also loved her advice that you will always find something different so you just need to pick something that looks good and make it work for you, stop thinking that everything else must be better.

I opted for their blank planner pages and immediately started using it. My book is a bit thick because I created one that not only finished last year, but carries us through all of next year. You can have these spiral bound at Staples for about $5.00. This was an extremely economical option for me because it was customizable and we've figured out how to get our printing costs down to nearly nothing.

Now instead of facing a plan that is always off, I turn to a new page each day, write the date at the top and fill it in as we go. It takes me no time to write things down as we go and I can fill in the subject areas that we need each day so I'm not taking up space for history if we didn't even do history that day for instance. There is plenty of room for both of the boys to share one page and I can easily keep track of what we do.

 I also have month at a glance pages and these weekly pages, I'll explain how I use these later. 

We've dabbled in notebooking and I plan on using it a lot this year so they will both have their notebooks as "records" for the year. I will also be taking and printing lots of pictures that the boys and I will work on putting into some type of scrapbook together, most likely in connection with their notebooking.

I do of course have some type of plan for the year, I'll share that will you soon!