Wednesday

How to Effectively Use Subject Planning Pages

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how to fill out subject planning pages and how planning this way allows you to plan for the entire year without worrying about slowing down or speeding up destroying your pre-planned year. When I created my Homeschool Journal Planner, I knew that it was finally time for me to make some pretty subject planner pages to go along with my journal pages and goal page. Today I’m going to share how to most effectively use subject planning pages while using my journal planner.

Subject Planning Pages

As a natural planner there is no way that I could just journal our days without having some kind of plan in place so I had to have some planning pages in my journal planner, but how to fuse the rigidness of planning with the free flowing journaling style. Basically I came up with two different options.

1) You can rewrite your planned subjects on the journal pages along with any corresponding journal notes. Basically this method requires you to look at your subject planning sheet and copy into the journal section what you did that day from the planning sheets. So if I have “Read p. 25-37 of Winnie the Pooh” written in one of the squares on my planning page, then I would write that on the journal page, “We read p. 25-37 in Winnie the Pooh today. Levi seemed to like it, but all of those voices are difficult. I’ll try to find it on audio book before next week.” Can you tell why I love my journal planner?!? Those little notes make it so helpful!

2) You can mark off the work as you complete from the subject planning pages and save the journal pages for notes, comments, and memories only. Using the subject planning pages in this way means there is no need to rewrite what you did in the journal pages. You just mark it off on your grid and write any necessary comments in the journal pages. So in my example above I would simply cross out the square with “Read p. 25-37 of Winnie the Pooh” and write on the journal pages, “Levi seemed to like Winnie the Pooh today, but all of those voices are difficult. I’ll try to find it on audio book before next week.” Either method will work; your preference is the deciding factor.

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3) You can use your subject planning pages as a way to pace your school year. This little trick has proven invaluable to me ever since I started using subject planning pages about 3 years ago. Once I’ve figured out how many days we need to school each month, I can use my subject planning pages to pace myself. If we need to complete 15 days of school each month to finish by November and we do math every day, then I can count out 15 boxes in my planning grid and put a mark to let me know that we need to be at least to that point by the end of January.

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By adding this one little extra to my planning pages, I can quickly know if we’re ahead of schedule, on schedule, or behind. Of course, I know that there isn’t really a behind or ahead when you homeschool, you just work where they are, but it helps me to know our current trajectory. I mark up every subject that I plan this way so I can keep track of how well we are schooling or if we’ve been taking too many days off!

Remember, you can get my Homeschool Journal Planner for free by subscribing to my blog using the gray banner at the top of the page, the sign up in the sidebar, or the signup at the bottom of the page. Take a look at the other glimpses into my planner as well.

Journal Pages

Goal Page

Content Subject Planning Pages

Don’t forget to check out the other iHomeschool Network bloggers as we spend all week posting about different topics.

hopscotchjan2015

Planning and journaling are the perfect pairing in the tree house,

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