20 Best Tips
Teaching Textbooks

2009 Schoolhouse Planner Review

Just when I though the Schoolhouse Planner couldn’t get any better {or bigger} it did. And if I thought last year’s planner had it all, I was WRONG!

The cover isn’t the only thing that has changed in the The 2009 Schooolhouse Planner. It is bigger and better than it’s predecessor. Bigger by more than 100 pages and bursting with over 100 form {40 brand-new ones!} to help you organize your home and school life. If there is a form you are needing, or didn’t even know you needed, you will likely find it in the planner.

The Schoolhouse Planner is a 375 page pdf download {$39.99} that is available from the Schoolhouse Store. It is an interactive pdf file ~ that means you are able to type in the pdf file and save data in the various forms or print them off with your information already entered.

The 2009 Planner contains articles on a variety of topics: the thirteen colonies, weather, lap books, letter writing, homeschooling around the world, learning to spot planets and more. It also provides resources to have at your fingertips including US states and capitals, invention timeline, US presidents, famous composers, 7 wonders of the world, and the periodic table. It also has monthly recipes {even one from yours-truly!}, green cleaning recipes, resource lists, and alphabet copywork charts.

And to give you a little ‘peek’ into the planner, here are a few of the forms you’ll find inside.

Homeschool Forms include:

  • Annual plans
  • Course of study
  • Yearly goals
  • Curriculum planning
  • Preschool planning
  • Education objectives
  • Yearly grades
  • Progress reports
  • Weekly schedules
  • Weekly planning
  • Field Trip planning
  • Audio/Video log
  • Science lab sheets and more

Household Forms include:

  • Weekly schedule
  • Home repair projects
  • Grocery list
  • Menu planning
  • Budget sheet
  • Prayer journal
  • Garden plans
  • Pet health
  • Website login/password information and more?

The best features? Being able to type in your own information before printing it off and only print off what is needed {or wanted}. If you get halfway through your year and realize a different form would work better, you can switch easily. Storing your homeschool and household information in a binder allows you have everything conveniently in one place.

While it might seem that I am always on top of things, I can honestly say that having a great planner helps me immensely. I’m the type of person that needs lists to visualize what is coming up. During our school year there is a huge difference in our productivity when I have taken the time to sit down and plan out our week vs. hoping for the best. The price of this planner might seem a little steep at first, but keep in mind that this is a planner you will be able to use for years to come! Since the forms are all blank, you’ll be able to save the pdf file on your hard drive and get a jump on future planning too.

Be sure to visit The Schoolhouse Store and see more that the 2009 Schoolhouse Planner offers. As an added bonus, if you order between June 11, 2009 and July 12, 2009 you will receive the 2008 Planner Excerpts FREE.

Click on the Homeschool Crew banner to read other reviews about this product.
As a member of the Homeschool Crew, I was given this product to review,
and I do not have to return the product to the vendor. I was not paid for this post.
All opinions expressed in this post are mine.

Photobucket

Our Geography Travel Log

To keep track of our travels around the world using a notebook approach of sorts. I’ve found a way to include the lapbooks that we’ve made to go along with our studies and we are also having fun stamping our passports each time we leave a country that we’ve been studying.

Just to give you a peek into our binders, here’s how I set them up. I belong to a yahoo group that had the files to print off for the binder cover. We are using Flag It World Flag stickers as our "passport stamps" as well as the blank passports that I found to use from Rainbow Resource (you can buy both together and save a little bit).

The binders were picked up at Walmart and I bought a set of 8 tabbed dividers so we had place to put info from each continent and its’ countries behind each divider. The binder collects and holds all the things that we create: our flags, country information sheets, Children Just Like Me sheets, currency sheets, etc… anything that might be fun for the kids to flip through later and remember what we studied.

When we create lapbooks that are related to the countries that we study (China: Pandas, India: Tigers, Japan: Volcanoes), I found a way to put them in the back of our binders so that they are all in one place. I cannot remember for the life of me where I saw the idea to use the duct tape on the side of the lapbook, so I apologize in advance. It’s been extremely helpful though, so I put together a separate post on how to store lapbooks.

Once our study of a country is done, the girls find the flag sticker belong to that country and we put it in our passport along with the dates that we studied that country. The passports were blank and I used some of my alphabet stamps to stamp each page and then a marker to divide and section out the pages for the dates and stickers. The front cover design of the passport was also a file that I found via a yahoo group (and there are not big black blots on the actual passport like you see in the picture – I just blotted them out since there was some personal information on the picture).

Hope this helps some of you all out in picturing how we are pulling it all together in our studies. If you have any questions, feel free to post and ask.

Jolanthe Signature affiliate button