Color Coding the Plan Book

I've written many times about this favorite classroom routine, which I learned from my old Montessori school.

Children keep a written record of each thing they do during the day that counts as school and put colored dots in the margin to show which subject(s) the activity is. When they are little you can scribe for them, and then they will gradually take over the writing. You can use regular composition books or those with primary paper or Montessori paper (available in two sizes).

You can do this routine at the beginning of the day for goal-setting, throughout the day to help you strive for a balance in your activities, or at the end of the day for reflection. For homeschooling families this is wonderful documentation if you find that you are dejected at the end of the day that you're not doing "enough." A lot of what we do has learning embedded in it, and it's so fun to see it all down on paper!

Our colors are

yellow - Language Arts

orange - History & Geography

red - Fine Arts

purple - Practical Life

blue - Mathematics

green - Science & Nature

brown - P.E. & Health

gold - Penmanship

silver - Foreign Language

pink - Play

In years past I've bought each child his/her own box of colored pencils to use in color coding the plan book, but this year I realized that I have so many leftover pencils from previous years that we can absolutely just use those! So I set them up in little ceramic jars, one for each color. They look so adorable (I still need to get three more). Then I went looking to see if you could buy these pencils separately, if there's just one color you are short of. And you can!

Lyra Super Ferby Color Pencil - SINGLE
A Child's Dream
$2.70 each

White - 001

Zinc Yellow - 004

Lemon - 007

Light Orange - 013

Scarlet Lake - 018

Light Carmine - 027

Pink Madder Lake - 029

Peach Pink - 032

Magenta - 034

Violet - 038

Sky Blue - 046

Light Blue - 047

Prussian Blue - 051

Peacock Blue - 053

Aquamarine - 054

Viridian Green - 061

Sap Green - 067

Apple Green - 070

Van Dyck Brown - 076

Venetian Red - 090

Medium Grey - 097

Black - 099

Rainbow Garden School Store (which supports Houstatonic Valley Waldorf School) prices the pencils at $2.80 apiece and has these additional colors:

Light Violet - 039

Gold - 250

Silver - 251

Stores tend to sell out of the metallics, so I'd recommend checking Palumba. As of Aug 27, 2023 they still had Silver and Gold in stock ($3.20 apiece).

If you are in Australia, Rainbow Tree sells all of these colors as individual pencils and has nice little colored boxes to help you see what they look like.

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!