Well Planned Day, Family Homeschool Planner, July 2019 - June 2020 Spiral-bound – January 1, 2019

I’ve been getting this book for several years now and love it so much! There’s so many great features to it. It’s designed for up to four students. I’m a list maker, and it has so many places for that. There are shopping lists, cleaning lists, a place for daily chores, monthly field trips, goals, reading lists, to do lists, a weekly dinner menu, a place for daily scheduling for the student and a separate one for the teacher, calendars, holiday planning, attendance record, grade log, report cards, encouraging words and verses throughout the book, not to mention it’s beautifully put together!

So far so good. This planner appears to have everything I wanted to have, laid out pretty intuitively. I did end up removing it from the coil, though. The cover is pretty much thin cardstock, and the coil annoyed me, because it is the flexible kind, not the sturdy, firm kind. Therefore, it did not quite lay flat enough for my liking, and the cover was getting bent up. Much like curricula that have those cardstock covers which can end up coming off halfway through the year, I expected to find myself annoyed with it, so for now I have the whole thing in a 3-ring binder (super easy since they are hole punched for it), though I may end up punching the pages for a ring bound system. Aside from that, the only other changes I have made was to move the attendance sheets to the beginning of the planner for easy access. In all, this planner seems like it will do all I have wanted a homeschooling and life planner to do. A lot of other systems have required me to heavily modify them, or to add printed pages to make them work for me. This one is pretty, efficient, and reasonably priced (especially considering the time I have saved by not needing to really modify it). Next year I will probably preorder directly.

I think this planner is gorgeous. I love the scripture verses and quotes from educators like Charlotte Mason and famous figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. I also like that it includes articles each month on homeschooling and the planning pages such as a spot to make a schedule for each individual child and academic and character goals for each child, as well as a master schedule for you, the teacher. As you have more children that are school age this is really necessary. Additionally I like that there is enough space for 4 children to track (except eventually we will outgrow it 😳). I also like that each month at a glance is grouped with your weekly schedule for each week of the month and a booklist spot for each month versus all the months, then all the week at a glance planning pages followed by one large yearly book list log. I feel like it makes it easier to glance at your month each week to help you keep track of any commitments (as a mom of 6 I struggle to keep everyone’s schedule straight at times!) and a month by month book list log is more manageable for me. As a Charlotte Mason inspired homeschool family this great because we read a lot of books!Additionally I find the over all format of the planner to be super CM friendly.One thing I wish the planner had was a front and back inside pocket to store forms and school work. Sometimes if we don’t have a lot of time to pick up after school, I put school pockets in one pocket to file in their binder later (or maybe we are going to continue using a worksheet the next day or during that week), and the other to put forms, schedules, etc in. The other thing that could be problematic is that it only tracks up to 4 children. Right now that’s ok for us because I only have a kinder, 4th and 7th grader that are school age, but at some point I’ll have 5 in k-12. Another suggestion is there are only 7 subject tracking areas and 5 of them are predetermined- Bible, ELA, Math, History & Science with two blank. It might be nice to track more subjects than this or change them around since you may not do all of the predetermined subjects each day or week. ( I have solved this problem by listing one box as electives since we probably only do 1-2 a day of these and one as kinder activities as I don’t need as much space for my younger kids and they are doing things a lot more separate than my older ones.). Although I’m not sure how you could fit it all in a 2 page spread. Also in the weekly planning plages a place to list appointments or classes, play dates etc would have been nice alongside your week at a glance.Overall though I feel the pros outweigh the cons far more and I would definitely recommend this product.

This planner is very pretty and has a lot of features that I really like. I have always used a teacher planner from the teacher supply store and just modified how I used it to suit my homeschooling needs. I purchased this one for the first time this year and was very excited to have a planner designed specifically with homeschooling in mind. As others have said, there are a lot of different planning pages provided and some of them I found very useful and others just didn't really work for me at all, so I simply ignore them. The only major change that I would suggest to the author/publisher is that it would be much more useful and open ended if the subject titles on the daily section pages were simply left blank with a spot for subject headings on the left hand margin. I like to write in my subjects in the order in which we tackle them each day and it throws me off having a few subjects written in already. I simply put a line through them and wrote my own subject headings in, but I have to do that every week and it is a bit annoying. Other than that I have found this planner useful and of decent quality so far.

A few years ago I looked at this planner and wasn't that impressed to be honest. However, this year I bought the planner and it actually has all that I need this time around! I don't know if it has changed or I have changed, but I'm very happy that all that I need is now in one planner. The planner has laid out articles for how to plan my year, and what I should focus on each month. There are pages to lay out each child's schedule and books/curriculum used throughout the year. Chore charts for each child. Chore chart and home planning as well as 6 perforated monthly shopping lists for myself. A page each month for favorite books to read, things to do, field trips. There is a section to record my child's daily attentive. There are perforated report cards. Each double page spread is a weekly format, with each day individually labeled so that I can schedule my week's plans. This truly is an all-in-one journal! I am very pleased, and look forward to laying out my plan for September.