Teaching your homeschooled teen organizational skills is vital to preparing them for adulthood. Using their own homeschool planner is a great way to help them establish their own organizational routines.
I have always loved teaching my children how to learn independently and one crucial step toward accomplishing that was teaching them the practical skill of using a daily/weekly homeschooling planner. Over the years, I’ve purchased several and realized that can get expensive when you have several children. This is why the team at homeschool.com has pulled together a series of student homeschool planners that you can download for free!
How To Help Your Teen Use a Student Planner
- I take my pdf download of the homeschool planner to my local office store. I ask them to print it in full color and 3-hole punch the entire planner.
- I purchase a transparent cover 3-ring binder I slip the cover of my planner into the cover of the binder and then fill the binder with my freshly printed homeschool planner!
- Once I’ve planned our homeschool year using my own Sanity Saver Homeschool Planner, I can then give my students the weekly goals for their own planning purposes.
- I typically help my teens for the first few weeks of the homeschooling year. I give them tips and pointers on how to make a plan that works consistently.
Download Your Teen Student Planner
You’ve decided to homeschool this year, and now you’re looking for ways to make that process just a little bit easier. We are too! And that’s why we love using homeschool planners. Everyone in our homeschool has their planner. They may look and function a little differently, but each of us has a planner to help us keep things organized and progressing.
Importance of Using a Homeschool Planner
There were several years when I didn’t think I needed a homeschool planner. I often used a simple spiral-bound notebook, which is fine, but I found that I began to dread the process. I needed something fun and beautifully designed to keep me interested and motivated. For years, I purchased expensive homeschool planners that had a similar weekly layout. I loved the beauty of those well-designed organizational tools. But, there were times that I couldn’t afford to pay the money for those amazing planners. This is when I began to wonder if other homeschool moms were in the same situation of needing a tool but not being able to afford it? And so… The Sanity Saver Homeschool Planner was born.
How To Use A Homeschool Planner
Many of my homeschooling friends have asked me how I plan and what planning tools I use. My homeschool planning tools are simple… The Sanity Saver Homeschool Planner is my planner of choice, and the “how” I plan is also super simple!
- I take my pdf download of the homeschool planner to my local office store. I ask them to print it in full color and 3-hole punch the entire planner.
- I purchase a transparent cover 3-ring binder and I slip the cover of my planner into the cover of the binder and then fill the binder with my freshly printed homeschool planner! ( I use the mom homeschool planner here.)
- Then I start planning. This is where I use, “Keep It Simple Sweetheart!” as my motto. I’ve run the gamut on the different ways to plan and over the last decade, I’ve realized that simplicity rules!
- Determine your homeschool calendar year. Does your state require 180 schooling days? Do you plan on homeschooling 5 days a week or 4? What holidays will you take off? Will you homeschool year-round?
- Take the content that you want to learn and create one big goal for each subject. It can be a long sentence or several sentences.
- Divide up the content you want to cover into 4 quarters and fit those quarters into your “homeschool calendar.” Make a simple goal for each subject for each quarter.
- Then… divide the quarters into weeks. Each quarter will be roughly 45 days or 9 weeks. I divide what I want to learn in a quarter into 9 goals, one goal for each week of the quarter.
- I write those weekly goals down… but wait until the week before to flesh out my weekly plans. WHY? because with kids and mom and dad and life… things happen and your weekly plans will sometimes crumble into chaos. Keeping it simple and only planning one week in advance enables you to make a weekly plan that will be subject to less “erasures.”
- Once I have my weekly plan I share it with my kids. If they are older they can write it in their own planners or sometimes I’ll create a “check sheet” for them for the week.
We do this throughout the year, using each quarter’s nine weekly goals to plan our week. Sometimes the curriculum you choose may already do this for you. If so, embrace it and be thankful! Other online curricula may create a calendar for you. But it’s always helpful to know how to plan your year without a premade content schedule.
