Planning

I have mentioned before that I love planning.  It is my favorite part of getting things done.  I am a bit of a planner addict.  I have one that I am currently using that I LOVE!  I am a pen to paper kind of girl.  It is called Mom's Tool Belt. I love the day to day part.  It is what I use the most often.  It is completely editable and trust me, I need editable.  I moved things around and added a work area and took out the exercise area and replaced it with a blog section.  (After seeing myself in the mirror I am thinking I should add the exercise part back in! lol)

After I started using the planner the one thing that I didn't like was that it is a lot of black and white.  I thought about printing it off with color in it but I don't like using a lot of color ink.  My very clever hubby had a great solution for me - highlighters!  We set off to the store to find some in a variety of colors and I found - are you ready for it? - erasable highlighters!!!  Genius!  I had no idea they even made such a thing.  I use different colors for different blocks with no real rhym or reason.  I just thought that they add a pretty spash of color.  I guess I could color code things but I really like the colorfulness of my planner.

I do not use this planner for our school, though.  I have created my own workbox planner/schedule that I will use to keep up with what I need to put in workboxes each night and I have subscribed to My Well Planned Day software by Home Educating Family.  It is still in the Beta stages so I haven't gotten a lot done with it.  I cannot wait for the full version to be ready.  It will come with apps and hand scheduling for the entire family on our online devices.  Last year I used the Well Planned Day paper planner.  It didn't work very well for me.  I found that if we missed a day of work it threw a wrench in everything. I didn't like having to erase and move everything.  The new software will allow me to drag and drop our lessons so if something is missed we just move it over and keep right on trucking.  Great solution!  There are however, lots and lots of moms that swear by the paper planner.  I would love to get their binder to keep my planner and important papers in soon, though.  It looks amazing!

For my to-do lists I use a standard spiral notebook and jot down my to-do's and rip them off at the end of the day to start fresh.

What do you use for your planning?

Workbox Planner

I have searched high.  I have searched low.  I have googled.  I have stalked.  I have even looked in office supply stores and NO one has what I am looking for.  I wanted to have a planner that I could use to get our workboxes organized and ready.  I found several online that I liked but they weren't editable and lacked a lot of what I was looking for.  So, I had to go back in time a few years and dust off my excel expertise and came up with 2 designs for our workbox planner that I love!

 The first one has enough room in the workbox area to allow for details on the lesson.

While the second one has enough room for me to fill out for both kids.  I just don't have the detail section. 

I haven't decided on which one I want to go with for the upcoming school year.  I have printed a version of each out so I can look at them side by side and decide which will better suit my needs.  I hope to get a couple of other pages ready to go and then have the local office supply store print and bind them for me!  That way I won't have to go to all the trouble of that.  I have plenty of time to decide.   My deadline is mid July to allow me a month of planning before we start back to school. 

If either of these looks like something you could use please let me know.  I am happy to upload them to the documents and share them if you want!