How I Track Our Homeschool Days (with Printable Planner!)

There is a lot of great information out there about what other homeschoolers do to plan out and document their school years. But with that, it’s easy to feel pressure to fit that picture perfect ideal of what a well planned and well documented homeschool looks like. If you are like me, maybe that stems from your fears surrounding whether you will measure up to what you think is done inside schools. Or maybe it comes from your insecurities about what others close to you may think of your call to homeschool. It might even just be the fear of social services one day knocking on your door and taking your kids away and hauling you off to jail.

Whatever the case may be, we have to fight the urge to fit the square peg in the round hole. That’s part of what homeschooling is all about, isn’t it? We do not need to mold our children’s education into what the public schools say it should be or even what any other incredible homeschool mom may be doing.

Today I’m sharing the easy system that I designed to help me plan, visualize, and track our weekly homeschool activities for my Kindergartener. It took a lot of thought, a lot of attending seminars and reading books by wise women who have gone before me, and a pre-K year spent working though curriculum and revising different schedule ideas. But it was well worth it and is making my daily homeschool more peaceful. You can download the free printable pdf below to print and make it your own, or take the idea and run with it to create your own special system. And be sure to watch this quick tutorial on how to use all the features of the planner.

But first, let’s talk about how I got here. The lawyer in me of course started with what is required by my state. (If you aren’t from Colorado, skip to the next paragraph). There are a couple different options here in Colorado for homeschooling your children. In a nutshell, the state requires that you either file a Notice of Intent with the county school district and follow their requirements or that you homeschool under a private umbrella school. We are part of one such school which I highly recommend as they are actively involved in promoting homeschool rights in the state, they put on the state conference and have a ton of additional benefits as well. So my very affordable enrollment fees are well spent, and the organization is well staffed and has stood the test of time. I don’t need to track hours or create a portfolio, but as you’ll see my planner can be used to be as detail oriented as you desire, other than maybe for journaling each day’s specific activities in narrative fashion.

The next consideration which was super important to me was to figure out what our homeschool was going to look like. I recently listened to a fabulous seminar in the Back2Homeschool web conference put on by Teach Them Diligently. Amy Roberts of Raising Arrows broke down the difference between a routine family and a schedule family and what your homeschool might look like depending on where you fall. She did a great job at explaining this all very succinctly and understandably while giving great practical examples and freeing the routine families like mine to embrace the uniqueness of our own homeschool.

The rule of thumb is that your husband usually sets the timing based on his work schedule and you set the tone. If you are a schedule family, you may have set hours to sleep, eat and work and this doesn’t often change. Routine families, on the other hand, adjust waking and meal times depending on what has happened the day before and the dad’s work schedule, which is usually more of a flex schedule or does not have predictable hours.

My husband and I are both Realtors and have incredibly unpredictable work schedules. You never know when a buyer is going to call to go see a house and you never know when a listing is going to get an offer. Add to that the hot housing market that we have had in the Denver area for the last 5 years and it gets even more unpredictable and demanding. We aren’t always sure what days will be less busy (because let’s face it, when you are self-employed there are no weekends), and our shared meal time may often shift from dinner to breakfast. For this reason, it is hard to come up with a consistent M-F schedule like some homeschoolers. If you pop in to our homeschool on a Thursday at 10am, I can’t tell you for sure what we are going to be doing. And that’s okay. We are more of a routine family and we find different ways to track and manage what we have going on.

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I love the idea of loop schedules where you have a list of extra subjects that perhaps you don’t cover every day and you accomplish them as you work down a list and have the time during the week, and then loop back up to the top of the list. This is great to take the pressure off if you don’t hit one of your non-essential subjects as many times as you’d like to during the week. But I’ve adapted this idea into more of a visual form which gives me even more flexibility with our crazy lives. So if I’m wiped out from a late night working and the kids are melting down and I don’t want to even open the pantry door for fear of the chaos and mess that will ensue, I’ll just go for whatever empty block will calm the madness, rather than just the next stop on the loop. This will make more sense after you watch the quick planner tutorial.

As far as the actual subjects, curriculum and what we deemed to be our essential subjects each day came next. Knowing about how long your typical lessons last for your curriculums can be helpful with customizing and using this planner. It makes the documenting and running totals so much easier and I spend just a couple minutes, literally, at the end of each day just marking it up.

Since we aren’t a schedule family, I can’t just divide up some workbooks and mark each day we school off knowing that we hit these certain lessons in these certain subjects, etc. And for that reason, planning and documenting our year could be stressful. But this planner has helped me to embrace the more flexible approach. It actually frees us up for more field trips and experiential learning because I can’t be too tied in to any schedule. I did enough tracking time as a lawyer billing clients in 6 minute increments. I can be more present and allow my kids to go down the rabbit hole or even off on a tangent that interests them without stressing about being late for what’s next or how track everything we did. So here it is!

Free Printable Kindergarten Homeschool Planner

And here is how it works: My Kindergarten Homeschool Planner is designed to fit on one page so that I can pop it into a page protector and make a few simple x’s and tick marks each week to scan it in at the end and wipe it down for the next week. I have a cookbook stand in my kitchen that I leave it on and it requires very little thought to go mark off a couple boxes after each learning block in our day or even at the end of the day. We typically have two blocks of time for school: one in the morning, and one during our toddler’s nap time. But this changes as nap, work, and life schedules do.

I do not like the idea of a bunch of labor intensive work at the end of the school year to turn in my information to our umbrella school. Luckily, they have a really easy calendar where you just mark each day off. I do this alongside my planner in order to stay on task. But I’ve also included a section on my planner where you can keep running totals of the week’s hours/days and the school year’s hours/days as you continue adding to them each week. There is also a section below each subject to reference any specific curriculum, work product or details of the school work. For a single page I really aimed to make it comprehensive and easy on the eyes.

Homeschooling is not for the faint of heart. It is a sacrifice of our selves, mamas. But it is also one of the greatest gifts we’ve been given IMHO. God has blessed us with the ability and He will see you through it. And to the extent I can share any of these tips and tricks to make it easier to follow the call, that is what I hope to do. If you try the planner or make changes or come up with something new, please share! I’d love to hear about it and so might other mamas that it might help.

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