With each new school year comes a need to plan, so check out the just-released Hey, Mama! Homeschool Planner for 2019/20 Year by The Old Schoolhouse®. The author and creator of it is Gena Suarez of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine. I was sent a copy to look over and use with my own family for homeschool organization.
If you want one, too, you’ll want to order fast! They’ve already sold out of almost 98% of the printed copies and they don’t have plans to print more Hey, Mama! planners until next year.
The planner is a softcover book and is spiral-bound. Its cover is vibrant and shiny, and the 189 inside pages are just begging to be written in.
The Hey, Mama! Homeschool Planner is a great tool for families homeschooling multiple children. The forms and pages on here are helpful specifically for home educators, unlike many “teacher planners” that you can find elsewhere.
There is a page talking about academic transcripts, followed by a blank sample academic transcript form that covers each year of high school. Next, there is a page for you to fill out called “Checklist and Skills Learned” and the page you see below called “Other Courses”. Next, there are simple calendars for 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Next, the planner jumps right into a monthly devotional for July 2019 written by Gena herself, followed by a page to make notes for the month.
After the page for notes, there is a calendar for July 2019 that looks much like the sample I have pictured below for February ’20.
This same format of devotional, page of monthly notes, and dated monthly calendar is repeated through June 2020. Immediately following those pages are the “Week of” pages that I show examples of below.
Immediately following the weekly pages are more forms. These forms are repeated for 5 children. For each child, there is a page to list your child’s name and write down notes, as well as a Curriculum Planning page. Next is an attendance log, a place to list books your child has read during the year, and then some goal sheets.
The goal sheets include yearly, first semester, and second semester goals and have places for goals for each of the following growth areas: educational, spiritual, physical, personal talents, life skills, financial, and relational. Next, there is a lined sheet to write whatever notes you wish.
This is repeated for 5 children and that concludes the contents of the planner.
I’ve decided to use the weekly pages to keep track of goals or the amount of assignments I want my children to accomplish each week. For example, if I want my kids to read for a certain amount of pages or minutes, or complete a specific number of math lessons, or perhaps want to get through a specific chapter in history in a week, I will write it down in this Hey, Mama! planner.
Seeing it written out that way will help me to know how to schedule things, especially on weeks where we’ll be gone most of the day for our homeschool co-op or when we take off for playdates or long weekend trips.
Once I looked over the planner and decided how I wanted to use it for the 2019-2020 schoolyear, I had to crack out the washi tape and fancy gel pens to get it decorated and personalized!
I like that there are 5 columns for 5 children. Although my youngest is not yet school-aged, we do occasionally get review items for him to work on. This will help me to remember to schedule those in for him throughout each week.
I am going to be using the rows for different subjects. We have our core subjects, as well as “other” and “review items” listed. I wish there was enough room to list the exact daily work for each child for each day during the week, but we currently use a different planner system for my children themselves, so I’m using this one as a master planning list.
There are a total of 36 weekly two-page spreads. Every 2-4 weeks of weekly pages, another devotional is there from Gena to encourage and inspire the homeschooling mom using this planner. They’re each one page long, so short and sweet, and include Biblical wisdom and verses to back it up.
I recommend this planner if you are homeschooling a handful of kids and need a good, central location to organize everything. It’s a great way to keep track of what you want to, or have already, accomplished each week and month. It helps everyone to be more accountable throughout the school year!
The moms on the Homeschool Review Crew had a lot to say about the Hey, Mama! Homeschool Planner for 2019/20 Year. To see how they are setting theirs up for the next school year, click the banner below:
