A bit on organization

I'm find that I flourish creatively when things are a little... disorganized. Really, you should see my craft closet. But when it comes to schooling, I've always needed organization. I love to procrastinate and being organized really helps me to stay (by the skin of my teeth, and by the way, wtf is with that expression?) on the right side of razor thin deadlines. Now I'm no longer in school for the first time in many years, but as we ready ourselves for the Great Homeschooling Adventure, I've begun organizing fiercely. Since I'm creating the curriculum for this year I've had to stay on top of things to be ready for August.

The organizational plan is broken into two parts: an online database/calendar, and an offline old-school, write-everything-down planner. For the online aspects, I'm using Basecamp. If you've heard of it you'll know that it's a website for project management. It is very well-designed and lends itself beautifully to homeschooling. More on Basecamp in the future. Onward, heathens!

For the tangible, writable, smellable planner, I went with the Create 365 Happy Planner Teacher Edition. Disclaimer: no one gives me free shit, I just like to pass along info about good shit to other people who may find said good shit useful.

I picked mine up at Hobby Lobby, which made me feel dirty and now I have to donate to a non-bigoted cause to make up for my guilty, shifty-eyed, ear-plugging shopping trip. Seriously, how many ever-loving piano versions of How Great Thou Art are in existence, Hobby Lobby? I totally changed the lyrics to How Great Thou Fart in my head to just make myself feel better. I try hard to avoid that store but they were having a half-off thing and these planners are like 30 bucks and I'm broke and do you know how many books I could get from goodwill with that spare 15 bucks that I saved? Like 15. FIFTEEN BOOKS. Ahem, moving on. This is what it looks like:

 

I love this planner. The original Happy Planner is an 18 month version, the Teacher Edition is 12 and there's also a Student Edition available as well as accessory and expansion packs. I'm planning to expand mine by adding a few of the Home Planner packs to keep up with housework, meal planning, and budgeting (all areas of struggle) in addition to school and life.

That's a really truthy quote. Even contract killing.
I mean, somebody gave Ol' Bugsy some marksmanship pointers, amiright? 

Full year calendar

Month at-a-glance

Monthly calendar

Guess who didn't take a picture of the planning pages? That would be me. I might remember to photograph these tomorrow but in case I procrastinate and you're still curious, each spread has 7 subject columns and 5 rows (Mon-Friday) with approx. 2"x2" lined boxes for content. It also has a space for writing in the week number and the date for each day. Wow, my description was just as good as a picture, right?

 

In the back there are these Classroom Checklist pages which will come in handy for roll taking for all of my 1 students.

So that's the planner. Tomorrow I'll be posting the (hopefully finished) Pre-Primary Literary Explorations schedule for the full year. The expanded units will be released as I finish them, so the full program should be wrapped up by the end of next June. If you're interested for this year I'll try to make sure that they're up ASAP so that as long as you're at least a week behind us you could conceivably start it this fall.