Homeschool Planning using an Anna Vance Planner

If you saw my last homeschool post about why we decided to homeschool this year, you know all about which curriculum we are using and why. Now, I’m going to show you how I planned for it this year. I am new to doing school this way. I’ve attempted homeschool in the past and I’ve always hated it, felt like I failed and not in the typical mom feeling failure, but like actual failure and dreaded every day. I also went through a pretty massive healing and self-improvement in the last three years and I am hoping this new person is able to do it way better. But, this post will be all about how I laid out our school year and made all the plans.

In my research in deciding to homeschool, I found this amazing small business that allows you to customize a homeschool planner. I was all on board. I found it in February and spent several weeks looking into the planner and reading other blog posts about how much they loved it. I had to wait for their pre-orders to be released in March and then I placed an order after watching all the YouTube videos I could find put out by the company on how to order and the different pages I could choose. This is an Anna Vance planner and it’s pretty bomb. It did take almost three months to arrive but it was worth it so plan early if you plan on purchasing one. I ordered the classic planner, all the extra pages, dot grid note pages and the planner 7B layout.

There’s lots of different page options. I really like this goal setting sheet for your homeschool plan for that year. I weighed where I thought I would struggle and then made goals based upon those weaknesses.

I also really like this page. It was a page designed to let you fill in with quotes and verses to inspire your homeschool journey.

My cousin will be so proud of my use of sticky notes. I used sticky notes to design a plan before I put ink on paper. Each one of my kids has their own page for attendance. This is what this one will be used for tracking.

Each of my children have a goal section for me to fill out. Since I am new to this, my goals were pretty basic and circled around how they struggled in traditional school. They were short and this will expand as the year goes on and we get a bit of experience under our belts.

This page section was pretty awesome as well. It focuses on goals and ideas the kids have about their schooling. Our first day of school, the girls will be filling these out and at the end of the school year, we will fill out the back side of this page where it has you list improvements and success stories.

The Map Your Years section is awesome. This one gives you two years of perpetual calendars to plan everything out. I have one in public school as a senior and then three in homeschool. So I did both calendars on this section and color coded them to see where they overlapped. I planned a lot of time around my oldest daughter’s schedule so we can spend time with her when she’s home from school.

I’ve never really had to plan out our homeschool since I’ve always done a complete curriculum through either an academy or online so this is very new to me. I used sticky notes to decide how I wanted to use this page. When I ordered it, I knew I had to do a layout that was flexible. I ordered the 7B layout from Anna Vance. I didn’t want anything that was rigid or spaces for individual subjects since the one we are doing is all inclusive. Once I had a plan on how I wanted to use it, I LOVED it. Sticky notes allowed me to move things around find the perfect place for everything.

This is how the planning ended up. The far left section is where I have the color code key, notes and prep work that needs to be done. The next box started the days of the week starting on Monday. The top section has the girls school plan and the bottom is my space for to-do lists and our schedule then the bottom box is where I can plan the menu. I like having everything in one visual so I can view the entire day instead of needing two different planners to see my day. Each of the girls and I have a color code that goes as a dot next to each assignment. As the girls bring me their books and show they have it done, it will get a check mark and I can track in a single glance which work got done and which ones didn’t. I really like this system because it’s on one single page and still allows me to track everything.

To start planning, I used the monthly pages to write down each unit and which lesson we will be doing each day after I figured out the breaks we will be taking on the Map Your Years pages.

This planning page was awesome too!! I had to use some of the note pages at the back of the planner to plan the art projects and plans and special trips.

Once the plan was written out, I used the sister page by the monthly spread and planned out the books I wanted to read the girls, weekly projects and the unit field trip. Each unit should take five weeks to complete doing it four times a week. If you did five days a week, it would take you a month to finish.

This page was also pretty helpful to see the lesson plans at a glance. But I had to finish the monthly plan and the Year at a Glance before I could do this one. But I like that I can see what lesson plans will be when. A bit redundant but still has a slightly different purpose.

There are several reading lists in this planner. I used one to plan all the books I wanted to read to the girls and one for the books I want to read myself for the year.

The habit tracker to me is meh. There’s so many different things to track that to me it seems way overwhelming. There’s a few things I wanted to track but this will probably not be used.

I really liked this page to plan out future curriculum. The girls and I went over the different options on Gather Round Homeschool’s website and decided which ones we wanted to do the following year. Gather Round has a big sale in the early spring so I wanted to make sure we got a leg up on the plan for the following year so we can order when it’s all on sale.

This is out 100 book challenge. I found this free printable from Everyday Reading. I printed four of them and scaled them down to about 75% and then glued them to the note pages in the back. We will color in the books as we finish books.

This is my student planner I designed for the kids to take control of their own planning and education. Every morning, my kids will use my planner to write down their own school work requirements. They will track the weather so they begin to become aware of their surroundings and weather. The little icons under that are their habit trackers. They will track planning every day, their water intake, taking their vitamins, reading for 10 minutes, brushing their teeth and their bible study. Two of those things will be done as part of their homeschool day. But I did that on purpose. I didn’t want to overwhelm them but I also wanted them to be responsible to get them done and tracking them.

The bottom box will be for them writing their chores out every day and also be responsible for getting them done and tracked.

This is the teacher books for Gather Round. I chose to have them printed. I didn’t want to have to worry about having to print every unit’s teacher guide, student books for three kids and have to keep everything in order and get them added to binders. I added a special request to have them not bound straight from Gather Round. I hole punched them and added them to a four inch binder for me. For the girls, I used a two inch binder to put the workbooks for the unit we are studying at that time and their bible study books. The rest of their workbooks are added to a three inch binder and put on their bookshelf. Once we move to a new unit, they will switch them out. This will make it easier for their little arms and hands to control the binders because mine is massive.

I love the quality and design of Gather Round Homeschool’s materials. I am VERY happy with this purchase. Our first unit of study this year will be botany. I chose to do this in the fall so we could explore it in nature since we live in Wyoming. Everything will be dead come the end of October.

I am a sucker for rainbow pens and I always add a new package to my arsenal. These are the pens that I used in filling out my planner. I really love these ones currently. I love microfine pens for writing. Anything thicker than that for writing instantly makes me cringe.

I love these dot pens. Like love them. I’ve used them for a few years in my planners and bullet journals. One end has a large rounded tip, perfect for making a single dot for the planner. I used these to do the color coding dots for the lesson planning.

These highlighters I used to color code the calendar and Map Your Years pages. I used the pastel ones for this. They say they are bible highlighters but they’re really dark and I can’t imagine using them in my bible.

I am a sucker for Sharpies. I like these pens because they don’t bleed through the pages and they have a fine tip. I used these to color the 100 book challenge. They’re perfect for planners.

I really like to color code as much as I can because it makes it simple to see but I don’t like everything in color because I feel it majorly distracts me and is visually too busy. So I use these awesome micro fine sharpie pens to write everything and then color code using the dot pens. I actually have these pens on an Amazon auto delivery because I use them so much. My husband hates them. It makes me chuckle.

It took me about a week to complete the entire plan and fill out the planner. I think it’s only because this is so new to our family and next year it won’t take nearly as long to figure out. I am very happy to have the completed plan, a date we are starting and all the crafting projects and books to read done. If we have to veer off the plan, that’s just fine but this gives me a very solid starting point.