Plan Book Pictures

Daily Organization That Works For Us!

Right now, I have three daughters -- ages 11, 12, 13 -- and a 9 month old baby boy. I use the Carson Dellosa "The Green Plan Book"to plan my homeschooling day and it is perfect for me!

The girls use regular black & white composition books with our color coding written on a large index card and taped inside the front cover. They also each have a box of Prismacolor pencils, but you can buy these individually at arts & crafts stores like Hobby Lobby, Michaels, etc. to save money. We use yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, green, brown, gold, and silver.

We had to buy the gold and silver singly. The Prismacolor box that contains them seemed too unwieldy for daily use. So this is the one the girls have:

The right hand side of my two page weekly spread has one column for each of the colors above, and a final column for Notes. The left hand side has eight columns which I've divided in half with a simple pencil line down the middle of the page. Left hand side is my notes for Natalie's MLB and the right hand side is for Leah's. In each day's section of the plan book I use the four little "mini" columns to write my notes for four things to get done in that main lesson. I write each one vertically. This way, I can put a diagonal slash through that little column when it is done. Draft summary and add to MLB, illustrate MLB, hear new story, watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, and etc.

The girls have their plan books with a page for each day and it is divided horizontally into thirds. We started this mid-year. Head, Heart, and Hands.

Sun, Moon, Star inspired by this lovely page from a Man and Animal MLB:

Within each category, they write in their work for the day and put the appropriate colored dot by it. We can see at a glance if we have had a balanced day!

Language Arts - yellow

Cultural / History / Geography - orange

Fine Arts - red

Handwork / Practical Life - purple

Mathematics / Geometry - blue

Science / Nature - green

Games / Sport - brown

Form Drawing / Penmanship - gold

Foreign Language - silver