Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Schoolhouse Planner

Oh me, oh my! I am so excited to be able to review The Schoolhouse Planner from http://www.theoldschoolhousestore.com/ . I have gone through all 247 pages of this planner and I want to share a little bit about it. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and read on…

The Schoolhouse Planner is hands down awesome! My absolute favorite thing about the planner is, well, I have two things that are my favorites. One is the ability to save your data that you type into the form. Way cool! My second, but equally as exciting to me, is the ability to bookmark any page I would like. I chose to bookmark the Table of Contents (ToC) so that I could click on the topics listed in the ToC, view the page I was sent to, then just click on my bookmarked page and go back to the ToC. I love not having to scroll back to the beginning page. Just click. Yeah!! (Maybe I’m just easily excitable!!haha)

This planner has so many forms, it’s hard to narrow them down to just a few, but I’ll try. I’d hate for your coffee to get cold from you not being able to drink it because you’re so engrossed in my review.

I like having Celebrations for the year all in one place so that I can schedule what I am going to do / not do ahead of time. It’s just easier for me to have all of the holidays in one place rather than go find a wall calendar and flip pages to find what holiday is when.

The recipes that are included sound so yummy. Makes me want to try them tonight! I think it’s nifty to get a planner that thinks of more than just school forms. It is definitely for your entire life, not just schooling.

I am excited about having the Kitchen Conversions Cheat Sheet & the Measurement Conversion Sheet included in the planner. I frequently need to look up equivalent measurements and now I know right where to find them.

For you history buffs, you’ll love the transcripts that are included. They are: Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution of the U.S. in its ORIGINAL form, (how cool is that!!!) Bill of Rights, Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address. All that I have written so far takes up the first page and a half of the ToC. WOW! So much information and so much more to go!! I’m so impressed!!!

This planner has household forms included with the homeschool forms. You have a form for just about anything you want to do. Some examples are: budgeting, chores, prayer journal, annual plans, goals, course of study, curriculum recording sheet, end-of-year evaluation form – which is my favorite since it includes a place for me to include my thoughts on the subject taught because I seem to forget from year to year why I like / dislike a certain curriculum (this sheet alone could have saved me hundreds of dollars through the years because I’m bad about either buying curriculum and forgetting about it, or buying it even though we didn’t like it but didn’t remember we didn’t like it at the time), yearly grades and report cards.

Having kids in high school, I really like the hours tracking logs. My girls do volunteer work and extra-curricular activities and I like having the form to keep in their files each year.

Another of my favorite forms is the loaned and borrowed book list. How many times I have loaned books out or borrowed books, not knowing who they belonged to, or who had them last, I cannot count. I plan to post this form in my bookshelf so I won’t forget to write it down!

Lastly, this planner also includes Bible Verse memorization forms, audio / video log forms, weekly planning sheets, unit study records, unschooling records, co-op info & support group info.
To sum it up, the price is well worth the product. I look forward to using many of the forms for my homeschooling year!!!

P.S. If you read all of this, you deserve some chocolate to go with your coffee.

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