Planning with The Schoolhouse Planners: A Short Review and Giveaway

****AND THE WINNER IS****

Congratulations to Beverly Steele, I will email you shortly for your choices

While I start thinking about our upcoming school year and plan for what we are hoping to do I also pick out some of my favorite planning pages form the Schoolhouse Planner. As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I receive my planner as part of the package. If you are a member of SchoolhouseTeachers.com you also receive it as a benefit of membership, and finally you can also purchase anyone of the 5 planners directly.

The Schoolhouse Planner is available in 5 different styles to fit a variety of ages and roles.

The Main planner , Mom's planner is actually a Home and School planner with a ton of forms for household, life, events, and homeschooling. It comes as a zip file and contains 3 folders: Household, Homeschool, and Calendars as well as a separate Start here document.  I love the variety of forms, especially when you can type in the document and save, you can also save a set of documents  as a single pdf file for the ones you reuse (especially the scheduling forms for multiple children )

We also use the Primary Planner. I like that the variety of forms and helpers are geared toward the primary ages. While we don't use all the forms or helpers, my 3rd grader is happy to have helpers that are what he needs.

My oldest son is starting 5th grade and will be using many of the helpers and lists from the Intermediate Planner this year. While he hasn't settled on the actual calendar and assignment format he wants to use, he is happy to use the helpers and lists from this planner.

I don't have any High School students yet and we don't use the Special Needs one  (although I may download it to get a look at some the behavior helpers as we are having some anger issues with one). 

Now you can win a copy of the Mother of all planners plus your choice of one of the student planners. 

This is open to all our readers with the exception of employees of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.

Leave a comment below letting me know which add on planner you would like to win.

***Extra Entries****

Follow us on one of the social media links found in the upper right corner and leave us a message with which one and your user name. (You may enter once for each social media site 5 total)

Share this giveaway on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus , or Pinterest  and comment with a link  to the post. (Pinterest shares please use the graphic below )

Entries accepted until midnight PST July 10, 2013. Winner will be notified July 11th and will have until noon PST July 12th to respond . (I will be leaving town on the 13th so need to make sure I can let the publisher know before I leave who the winner is)

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Consistent things

I realized the other day that nothing is really consistant in our homeschool. We are always tweaking things to hopefully improve them. I decided to find some of the consistant things and focus on those this week.

1. A plan, I always start the week with some kind of plan. We don't always stick to it, but we start somewhere. Currently I am using Scholaric for lesson planning.I can plan for each of the boys separately and I can print their weekly plan by subject or by days.

2. Unit Studies, I try to have a unit study going for our main lesson combining history, science, Bible, geography, and reading. Right now we are focusing on the Civil War.

3. Math, we working on Math 3 -4 days a week. This week we are back into our Math-U-See books. The boys each have their own blocks. Nathan is using our mixed set of Math-U-See blocks in a Green box while Cameron has a set of Morteson blocks we were given. The colors match across both sets which is a blessing.

Cameron's blocks inside a Playmobile carrying case. The Ziploc bag has a set of color matched crayons and a pencil.

Nathan's block box inside a Steralite container with his 

tactile numbers cards and a Ziploc bag of color matched crayons.

The cards I made were inspired by Montessori sandpaper letters and numbers.

I used green, blue, and red glitter glue to make a set of numbers to match the place values on Decimal Street. They serve as a reminder when he forgets how to write a number, he can find the number, trace it with his finger and then write it. 

4. Computer time is a reward. I let the boys play Webkinz, Webkinz jr, or Lego.com games as a reward for finishing their school work. Cameron's new favorite game is Star Wars on Lego.com.

Have a great weekend and Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms out there.

Blog Planner Form

So I am still working on my central communication binder (Mommy's brain, scheduling, etc...).

I know I don't blog enough so I decided to create a Blog Planner/ Scheduler. It is pretty generic and has me blogging during the weekend and leaving weekends open ended.

I hope someone else can use it. I figured I can write in meme's and such as well as inspirations from different events along the way.

Blog Planner