My Planner- Hardcopy Version

Ok so I've been mulling over my planner for this upcoming school year for a bit now. I've settled on a combination of current and past planners and it's pretty much all done. The base of the planner is the FIAR sets of planners for Before FIAR, Five in a Row, and Beyond FIAR.

I've tweaked it some to suit my needs. I'm trying something new this year with our school in an attempt to build some more relationships between our kids. Instead of everyone or half of our students working on separate unit studies, I'm going to try having the kids do more unit studies together using FIAR and some other resources. More details on the units and my plan coming soon. For now, I need my planner to reflect this effort. Care for a tour?

The cover- FIAR offers several color schemes each year

The printed calendar is from the FIAR planner. The pink sheet is a quarter planning sheet. I will use these to set up our timeline for each study.

Calendar pages from FIAR. I honestly prefer last year's which had larger blocks and filled the page. The graphics are nice though, huh?

Journaling pages from the FIAR planners

Preschool planning pages- the Before planner has just the journaling sheets to jot down what you do with your youngest student. However, years ago when I realized my toddler needed some structure, I began to plan it. Trish Kuffner, in the Toddler's Busy Book brought it to my attention that you have to plan out all those awesome activities with young kids sometimes or they just don't get done. Little ones lack the patience to wait on you to pull it together and before you know it, the moment is gone. The "pre- official homeschooling version" had all days of the week and a rainy day plan. I modified this one so that it only has Monday to Friday and no rainy day bail out plans- or at least no space for it. There are two columns. On the left a place to write up to three activities and on the right is the space for what to prepare ahead of time. Pretty simple. But oh so useful!

From the Beyond planner a Beyond course of study sheet- this one I plan to use to outline the details of each of our unit studies.

Pages from last year's FIAR planner- this is the actual FIAR weekly planning page. I ran them back to back and the green sheets are for I-6.

Same sheet in pink are R8's pages

E9's Beyond weekly planner pages- again last year's version had bigger blocks (I bought this year's Beyond planner to get an updated version of all the household pages and calendars- the planner comes with a menu planner, shopping pages, resource and library sheets, FIAR book plates, a what we did today sheet for books, movies, field trips- the works!). I'm using the old weekly planners for the middle two kids. If I get frustrated by less working space on these pages, I'll refer back to last year's weekly Beyond pages as well.

This planning notebook is where I do my pre-planning and the sketching and fleshing out of details of each unit and our weekly lessons. However, just like assemblies, field trips, and snow days or delays can mess up the best laid plans for a classroom teacher (I have plenty of first hand experience at this!) so can the happy homeschool experience some snags that force us to change things up. We take it all in stride, but at the end of the day I use a software program to record what we actually DID that day.

Next post: A review of the planning software I use.