Making a Homeschool Plan Book

I wanted a homeschooling planner. Searching online I came across a huge resource of printables for creating a custom homeschool planner on the New Bee Homeschooler website. Their guide and free resources are amazing. They are absolutely the inspiration for the planner I made for myself. I wanted to customize the pages and since, as you know, I'm a more than a little Type A I made my own planner using Microsoft Publisher. First, I wanted my planner to be half-size. I knew that a full-size planner would be bulky when opened and I want to keep my planner handy at the table when I'm working with the kids. The New Bee planner sheets are all full size. Second, I just wanted to put my own spin on most of the elements. This is how my planner turned out.

Making a Custom, Printable Homeschooling Planner

Cover

Here's my cover. It's fairly basic. I decided on an academic year that goes from July through June to match Missouri's school year. The cover includes the date of the school year covered, has an adorable picture of my children to remind me of -why- I'm doing this, and an inspirational teaching quote.

Section 1: Basic Records

The next page is an annual calendar I intend to use as an attendance record by highlighting or circling the dates when we have school. At the bottom of that page I have typed out the Missouri homeschooling requirements as a reference. School (and homeschooling) is optional in Missouri for kindergarten, so we don't need to adhere to these guidelines strictly our first year. A discussion of the homeschooling guidelines and tracking hours could easily fill a whole other blog post, so I'll leave it at that for now.

After my attendance chart I inserted a single page protector that holds a daily and weekly schedule sheet. I figured that my daily and weekly schedule is quite likely to shift several times during the year, so I wanted to be able to pull this sheet out and replace it with a new version at will.

Next, I created a logging form. Missouri requires 1000 hours of instruction per academic year: At least 600 of the 1000 hours must be in core subjects (math, science, social studies, language arts) vs. other areas of study (art, music, physical education, etc.). At least 400 of the 600 core subject areas hours must be taught at the home location. I created a form to keep track of our hours with codes for the different subject areas and columns to keep track of core vs. non-core hours. Again, this first year logging isn't mandatory, but I decided to work with the system and try to develop a good habit of logging. Also, this gives me a chance to work out any kinks in the system before the logging is mandatory.

Section 2: State Standards

If my children are going to learn everything they know at home, I'd like to make sure we're covering the basics. I went to the Missouri state teaching standards and created checklists for the kindergarten level standards. I put these checklists in my planner and intend to refer to them regularly and check off the standards we've achieved as Michael shows mastery. That will allow me to see at a glance what we've covered, and what I still need to focus on when doing my planning. Here is an example of page 1 of the Communication Arts Standards. I will do a separate post where I show you my checklists for all the content areas.

Section 3: Lesson Plans

I have a 2-page spread for each monthly calendar. I put in holidays and birthdays so that I could incorporate holidays and card making into our lesson plans. I also added a different inspirational teaching quotation to each monthly planning calendar page. After each monthly calendar I have 5 weekly plan sheets. Here is what a monthly planner and the weekly planner look like for us.

Section 4: Quick Reference

Near the end of the planner I put in a couple of quick reference pages I pulled from here and here. One is Bloom's Taxonomy and the other is a critical thinking reference sheet.

Section 5: Independent Reading Log and Notes

At the end of the planner I created an independent reading log. I want to play around with tracking the genre of the books read so that I can try to increase variety over time. This will almost certainly be a much more useful feature when the kids are older, so this form has room to grow. Then I just put in some pages for writing notes about how things are going or for jotting down ideas for things I want to cover in the future.

Back Cover

This is something I found online on the technology rocks. seriously. website and absolutely loved. She has a huge set of school signs available to download and print. I made my own version of my favorite for the back cover of my planner. I intend to use this as our homeschool rules to guide both the children and myself. I will refer to them regularly and therefore they make the perfect back cover for my planner.

Printing and Binding

And that's it. I printed them all out and used a binding machine to hold the planner together. I used contact paper to add durability to the front and back cover. I love the way it turned out.

CEU Challenge: Week 4 - Introduction to Ethical Decision Making in Speech-Language Pathology

This week I took the Introduction to Ethical Decision Making in Speech-Language Pathology course at LinguiSystems and received 0.2 CEUs or 2 hours of Continuing Education Credit.

I will admit that I was initially unenthusiastic about this one. However, as it turns out, I enjoyed it. I haven't done a lot of reading in the area of professional ethics, so it was pretty new to me. About 50-65% of the information covered in the course pertains to adult / medical speech-pathology practice, but the other half pertains to pediatric scenarios. I found the discussion about the four main tenants of professional ethical decision making (respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) to be useful and keeping this information in mind during practice would definitely help in prioritizing and decision making.

In summary, I found the Introduction to Ethical Decision Making in Speech-Language Pathology to be an easy, interesting read. The information covered in the course is thought provoking and I believe easily integrated into improving the quality of professional practice. The 20 question multiple-choice quiz was straightforward and quick to complete. I earned 0.2 more continuing education credits towards the 1.5 I need to earn this calendar year. At this point, I am over the halfway mark to my goal of 1.5 CEUs.

Did anyone else take this course? What did you think?

Don't forget to complete Week 5: HFA, AS, & NVLD: Differential Diagnosis by the SLP - 0.3 CEUs for next Friday! (The acronyms refer to High-functioning autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and nonverbal learning disorder.)

See the complete 7-Week Free CEU Challenge here.

If you missed it, catch up on my Week 1 review: Counseling Theories and Skills for SLPs - 0.2 CEUs. Then catch up on my Week 2 review: Evidence-Based Practice - 0.2 CEUs. If you're still going strong when you finish that one, check out the Week 3 review: Intervention Programming for Nonverbal Children - 0.2 CEUs.

Focused Elsewhere

Once I finally made the decision to homeschool, my attention has been completely focused on homeschool planning and my blogging has predictably decreased. I will try to find more balance. Of course, we've also weathered two stomach bugs, 4 colds, one case of croup, one episode of pink eye, and an ear infection that was only detected through a failed hearing screening at an annual checkup. I feel like I've been handling administering multiple doses of prescription and over the counter meds every day to multiple children for a solid month.

On the homeschooling front I've been busy. I decided that if I was going to homeschool kindergarten I should familiarize myself with the Missouri State Standards for kindergarten. I found them here: Missouri State Standards. One thing led to another and in my usual obsessive way I ended up making my own checklists. I'll post them for anyone who happens to be interested in a couple of days. I've created a printable checklist for Communication Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, Physical Education, Art, Music, and Dramatic Arts. I spent way too many hours working on this, but I feel good about being familiar with the standards for kindergarten and having a checklist to make sure we cover everything over the course of the year.

I also made my own homeschooling planner, printed it, and will be binding it as soon as Amazon sends me binding combs of the proper size. Again, I'll be sharing process and pictures shortly.

I will be continuing to use RightStart Math Level A. I continue to be extremely happy with the program. Ava will start at the beginning and Michael and I will continue where we left off at about 1/3 of the way through the level. I've reviewed about a month worth of lessons, making notes on the lesson plans and preparing the printables/consumables to go along with them.

I will continue to work with the Usborne Very First Reading Set (read about it here, here, and here), but for a time I will take a break from those. I want something that teaches phonics and decoding in a more organized fashion and I've chosen All About Reading Level 1. I love this program. I've done several of the beginning lessons with Michael and I really like the program. He's ahead because of the work we've been doing with the Usborne books and so we're doing two lessons at a time right now. When the All About Reading program catches up with his current abilities, we'll slow down and take things at his pace. I've reviewed and prepared the supplementary materials for approximately the first month of All About Reading lessons. I'll do a more thorough review of the All About Reading program soon.

I'm still working on science, social studies, and related arts planning. I figure the first month or more will be experimental in nature. We'll have to find the right balance of structured lessons, pre-school style activities, life and chores, and free play.

And that brings you up to date on what's been keeping me busy these days. I am about 3/4's finished with the /f/ speech therapy kit. I will admit that I haven't touched the file for about two weeks. I'm about done (I think) with homeschooling preparations for the time being, so hopefully I'll have some more free time to pick up that project again.