Making the Best Homeschool Planner to Fit Your Family

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Have you found a homeschool planner that works for you yet? It seems that you can always find a planner for your personal life, customize a planner for your work schedule, and make do with a teacher planner for lesson plans.

It would be so much easier if you could have planner pages that worked specifically for your homeschool schedule.

printable planner for homeschool

Planner printables make it super easy to print out pages for your homeschool lesson planner without all the extra fluff. Pick and choose the pages you want. Reprint as many pages as you need (like the weekly lesson plans).

The Best Homeschooling Planner

The best planner for homeschooling is the planner that you use. There is no point wasting money on a store bought planner that doesn’t have the correct style of pages to fit a homeschool schedule. Tracking curriculum, lessons, reading logs, and daily schedules is very chaotic. Add in multiple kids and you can count on grey hairs sooner rather than later.

Teacher planners (like the Happy Planner disc style) were one of my favorite planners when I taught elementary school. But even as a teacher, I had to customize it to make it work for my lesson plans. Weekly plans were great. Sometimes I needed more details for a day plan and then what about all the information you need to track for individual students and their data.

Customizing a lesson planner has become one of my favorite things to do. Silly, right?! But I just love knowing I can make a page that will help me organize my thoughts, track a student’s progress, and help me make a plan to meet their needs, the best way I possibly can.

printable homeschool planner with week at a glance plages

What Do You Need in a Planner for Homeschool?

There are a few key ingredients that you need when you are printing and designing your own educational plan for homeschooling.

  • Curriculum Plan
  • a way to track standards that each lesson is meeting
  • overview for the year
  • weekly homeschool plan
  • daily homeschool lesson plans
  • checklists
  • reading (book) trackers
  • home education expense tracker
homeschool planner printables

Your homeschool lesson planner will be more effective with these components. They definitely are not all you will need. Every situation will be different and need to be adjustable. But it is a start.

Making a Plan for Homeschool Lessons

Planning out curriculum, lessons, cross curricular activities, education trips, and your regular daily schedule is a lot for one planner.

Heck. It is a TON for you to wrap your brain around and try to keep track of. That is why planners are a thing.

You should take into account a few different things when you are designing your planner. One trick is to just print out a month and give that a try first. Then you will have a better idea about which sheets you will definitely use and which ones you can trash and not worry about printing for the remainder of the school year.

The last thing you need to do is waste time filling out planner pages that just don’t work with your personality type. You will start to dread the activity. Despise it even. And then you will avoid it.

disc system planners and 3 ring binders for homeschool planning

Making a plan that works for you and your kids is one of the joys of homeschooling. Set your days up for success by making them work for your personality, teaching style, and the modalities of learning that work best for you children.

Using a planner system that lets you add pages in, remove unused pages, or rearrange pages is going to help you simplify and organize the process. A binder or a disc planner system works best for this.

Homeschool Planner Supplies

There are a few planner supplies that you will need to get to make your homeschool planning process easier. My choice is the Happy Planner disc-system. My second choice would just be a sturdy 3-ring binder.

This makes it super simple to re-organize when unexpected events come up. Pages can be reprinted and added. Copies can be added. You can even add pockets to hold stickers, sticky notes, your favorite planner pen, or notes that you need for next months planning session.

Resources to make a traditional homeschool planner:

Printable Homeschool Planner

  • Customize a planner for homeschool by printing only the pages you need. Add them to your current planner or build one just for your homeschool needs.
  • Track reading progress.
  • Keep track of assignments, due dates, and each child’s curriculum.
  • Plan daily lessons.
  • View daily and weekly to-do lists
  • See each week at a glance.
  • Get an overview of what is happening with a month at a glance.

BUY IT HERE

homeschool planner printable
hp instant ink printer

A Printer with Affordable Ink

You need a printer that you can use to print your homeschool planner printables, lesson worksheets, rewards, and anything else that comes along. This is my all time favorite printer.

Because Insta-Ink is so affordable, I was able to print EVERYTHING I needed to decorate my elementary classroom, all my lessons to be copied, and even things for my own household for less than it would cost to buy new cartridges of Canon printer ink. It is CRAZY how much money this printer has saved me.

GET IT ON AMAZON

Durable 3-Ring Binder

A durable binder will make your homeschool plans easy to move around, limits wear and tear of daily use, and you can print a cover and binding for it with the printable homeschool planner above.

Order more than one so you can keep your lesson plans in one binder and the kids’ personal plans, curriculum, and assignments in the others.

GET THEM ON AMAZON

Binder Dividers for Planners

Plastic dividers with pockets will last a lot longer than paper dividers. They are also great for those little things you need to keep track of that don’t fit in your planner (sticky notes, stickers, library cards, etc.)

These can be customized for your disc-planner as well with a little creativity. Or you can get ones specifically for the Happy Planner (Big size only).

GET THEM ON AMAZON

Discs for Happy Planner

I love using the Happy Planner disc-system. It is a fun way to make your planning a little more bright and cheery. If you decide to go with this system, you don’t need to purchase a full ready-made planner. You can design your own with a set of discs, a planner punch, and the printable homeschool planner.

A classic planner takes 9 rings. ( you can read more about a few planner hacks in this post).

The big planner (full 8.5 x 11 page size) uses 11 discs. The expander pack is the way to go for that size.

Once you buy these discs, you can reuse them over and over for different planners. Just keep removing and adding pages to continue your planner. Or keep your page dividers and inserts and start a whole new planner.

GET THEM ON AMAZON

9 Hole Paper Punch

This paper punch works for the disc-system and is made for the classic size.

You can make it work for a big planner by lining up the top, punching the first 9 holes, sliding your paper to line up the last hole and punching the remaining 2 holes.

I struggle finding the big punch online (it is pink FYI…they color coded them).

GET IT ON AMAZON

Paper Mate Click Pens

I adore these pens. It is no secret (even though it used to be a toss-up between these and Flair pens…I think these ones are winning out.)

They stay in my backpack so I have them with me, no matter where I am or what I am working on.

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Planner Stickers for Homeschool (or Education)

Add some fun and color to all of your homeschool plans and schedules with these teacher stickers.

  • 1,733 stickers
  • Helping you plan and giving you a boost of confidence along the way
  • These stickers make it easy for you to customize your Happy planner, making everyday routines even more fun
  • These stickers are designed to fit in the daily column of your Weekly view in the classic Happy planner
  • Each package includes 30 sheets of stickers designed specifically for your Happy planner, featuring gold foil

GET THEM ON AMAZON

teacher planner sticker booklet

Your Planners Should Work for You

Pick and choose the things you want to include in your planner system. Start with a binder. Move on to the dis-system. It really is meant to be a flexible system. There are no hard and fast rules.

When you are printing out your planner pages to add to the Happy Planner disc system (if you choose that route) there are a few things to keep in mind.

You can resize your printed planner pages to fit the Happy Planner system. The following measurements make it super easy to resize your pages BEFORE you print.

Classic Happy Planner – This planner measures 7 inches x 9.25 inches. To resize your planner pages adjust the print size to 82%. They will print perfectly (just use a paper trimmer or scissors to cut off the white space on the borders).

Mini Happy Planner – Most likely you won’t be using this size for your homeschool lesson plans, but just in case. This planner has 7 holes and measures 4.5 inches x 7 inches. You need to scale your print size down to 54% to fit this planner.

The BIG Happy Planner – This is a full size planner. You can print all of your pages at the regular size because it holds an 8.5 inch by 11 inch paper size. It is an 11 hole planner so if you can only find the teal blue paper punch you will need to do a little creative hole punching to make it work.

Homeschool Planning is a Big Job

Keeping track of your child’s education is a big task. You need a planner that makes that process a little easier for you.

Mix and match until you find the right fit for your style, personality, and your families schedule. You got this!

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2 Comments

  1. Hi! Is there still a way to buy your planner packet? When I click the link, it says the page does not exist. Thanks!

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