Well Planned Day Family Homeschool Planner

Hello, my name is Kendra and I’m addicted to planners. Planners. To me that one word is a complete sentence. True story. Most girls are addicted to shoes, shopping, or purses. Me, it’s planners & tote bags. They lure me in & before I know it I have purchased one, or both.

Don’t miss the giveaway at the end! (This product was provided to Kendra in exchange for an honest review.  As always, her thoughts are entirely her own. Kendra is also sharing a review of the Student Planner on her personal blog. See the link at the end!)

The thing is, so many planners have a lot of valuable stuff inside of them, but not all of them are fantastic little planners in their overall state of being. Yeah, I might be a little biased & snobby when it comes to planners. I prefer to think of it as picky. I’m pretty sure my husband calls it overly opinionated.

Either way, I had the chance to use The Well Planned Day Homeschool Planner and I was tickled pink to have the opportunity! I mean it is a planner after all, right?

It’s a beautifully designed planner too, with lots of color and flowers and swirls all over it. Very appealing to the eyes for sure! I love color, I thrive on color. It makes me laugh & smile. Bright vibrant full colors, not to be confused with neon colors!

How I Use It:

Now, here’s something that might surprise most, but I don’t use this planner to plan in. Nope. I use it to journal in. You could consider it planning, because when you look into my planner that’s exactly what it look like, but rather then write down what I hope to accomplish in this lovely planner, I write down exactly what we did accomplish. When we sit down at the end of the week & we look back over our week, we see all the things we accomplished which can really keep a Mamma from saying, “Man we didn’t do much this week, did we..” It’s all right in front of me.

Remember how I said I love color? That applies to more then just how the planner is designed too. I’m a color coder. I once, jokingly, told my husband there was very little I couldn’t fix with a good color coded schedule.

I have a lovely set of fine point colored pens that I use to write in my planner with. Each person within my planner has their own color. There’s no need for me to label which person is which because I know which color is for which person. Some people choose favorite colors, which works for one of our boys, but the other child’s favorite color use to change as often as the seasons. So I simply assigned a color to him.

One child is blue, another is green. Things I do specifically might be jotted down in purple. Our menu is often listed off to the side in black or purple. Things we do together as a family can be red or orange. It not only makes me smile to see all those lovely colors all over the pages inside my planner, it makes sense to me. At a glance I can tell which child is where in their maths or spelling.

There are some things I might jot down before they happen, such as outings we are attending. I’ll often write then down in red and then box them in, draw a wavy circle around them, or something else to be sure that at a glance I can quickly see it. Why? So that I don’t try and squeeze a lot of other stuff into that day. Nothing says “bad day” like over scheduling!

The planner is broken down by months. Each month starts off with a calendar. Some years the calendar is a one page spread, other times it’s a two page spread. Each time it changes I think I like the previous way better, but then I adjust quickly & make the same lament next time. I fill in our calendar in advance making sure all outings, appointments, & due dates are filled in. That way when we sit down to see what our week holds & what we hope to accomplish I can see at a quick glance which days I need to be mindful of other things happening on.

Each month also has a reading list page. The pages are pretty open so you can fill them in as you want. It’s easy to slip the name of a student, in their respective ink, at the top of a column & then fill in the books they are reading. I often try to keep track of the books we read together, via audio, me reading aloud, etc. It’s impressive to sit down & see the various books you’ve read at the end of the year, but it’s also helpful because I don’t always right out the title of each book within the planner. I might use initials if the book title is lengthy, thus I can flip to the book list at the start of the month & double check what the initials of any given title stand for.

If you need a place to keep track of monthly expenses, there’s a place in there for that as well. There’s also a place to keep track of extra curricular activities as well if you want to do that outside of the calendar & planning pages.

Each month has six perforated shopping lists you can fill out and remove to take to the shop with you. I don’t use those as shopping lists very often because I generally place a monthly order for groceries online with a local supermarket. Instead I use them as portable chore lists on the weekend. Instead of getting annoyed that people didn’t do something I asked of them we all gather around discuss what needs doing and divide up the chores. I’ll often put fun things on the lists too like, “pick out a chocolate” or “go for a bike ride with Dad.”

Each month also features an inspirational article by various people out there in the homeschool community. The articles always vary in topics and author so you’re never reading the same article twice.

Each week is spread over two pages. There’s a place for every day of the week, all though the weekends are obviously much smaller. That works for us, because I tend to write down on them only if something major is happening: “Company for dinner make sure bathroom is clean.” or “Birthday party Sunday 2pm”

Each week has a Bible verse and a lovely quote, one on each page. There’s a place to jot down your entire menu for the week as well as any weekly priorities you might have. You can use that slot for prayer requests, reminders, or anything that suits your fancy. There’s also a mini calendar for the month you are on as well as the month ahead with the whatever the current week is highlighted in order for you to see where you are in the month.

Lastly, on the weekly page, there is also a small box with Catechism questions and answers. I’ll confess that while I look at that little box and find the information in there interesting if I didn’t all ready know it we don’t use it.

Hidden within the covers of this planner are also:

• Household Finances — an overview of anything you might feel the need to record. Honestly, I don’t use this small section. I only use the one on the monthly slots to record when & how much I need to pay for pool fees or field trips.
• Household duties — This is broken down by day of the week as well as month of the year. If you have duties/chores that you prefer to have done on/at specific times this is the place to write them down & refer to when you’re ready!
• Contact Information — From emergency contacts to websites you need to keep track of. There’s a full page with enough room to jot down a whole lot of contact information to have at your fingertips if you need it.

• Education Charts — You can fill these in & hand them to your children to use as needed. There are 4 chore charts, slightly larger then index cards, with enough space for your children to keep track of 6 weeks worth of things to do. You could easily use them as chore charts if you!
• Schedules and Plans — There’s one for the teacher & the students to fill in as much or as little as you want from 7am – 630pm Monday – Friday. There’s also a lovely place to fill in your Students information in regards to what subjects they’ll be taking this year and how much it will cost. There’s a place on that page to slip in a lovely photo of your child as well as personal information about them to look back & remember the little things {height, age, goals, etc.} about that year.
• Year At A Glance — There’s an entire page of mini calendars so at a quick glance you can see what you’re year will look like. You can then highlight special days or weeks where you’ll be busy. There’s a nifty list of holidays & the days they fall on so you can mark those as well if you want.

• Goals — There are also pages to keep track of your Semester Goals, both those you hope to accomplish & those you did accomplish.
• Holiday Pages — Have big plans for your upcoming holidays? There’s room to keep track of everything so you don’t forget what you’re doing, what your giving, or where you’re suppose to be.
• Report Cards — Yep, you read that write. There are report cards that you can fill out and give your children. They are located in the very back of your planner and made on heavy duty card stock. They are perforated for easy removal & can be folded in half on the pre-folded line. Just fill in & hand out.
• More — There’s also pages to jot down about your family for the year and include a family photo, pages for keep track of notes, pages for planning out a few things for your next school year, pages for keeping track of attendance.. I’m pretty sure that every time I thumb through mine I find something else!

What I love About it:

• First off, I love that this planner is spiral bound. I love spiral binding. I love that it means that the planner will lay flat if I have it completely open or folded in half.
• I love the vibrant colors. Even the cover has pretty colors on it that are throughout the entire planner. The colors change with each month, but I love that too!
• I love those mini calendars at the top of every weekly page that show me what week I’m on within the month. I know it seems like a small thing, but to me it’s huge!

• I like that I can keep track of what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what we’re eating all in one place. There’s no scrambling for a couple of different planners to find the information I need. I can grab one planer & transfer all the information to the calendars around the house.
• I love the slot for Weekly Priorities that I can use to jot down weekly prayer requests or things heavy on my mind I’d like to be in prayer about. A verse that might have spoken to me, etc.
• I love that this planner has the month page, then the correct amount of weekly pages repeated throughout. I know that sounds silly, but I had another planner I wanted to love that was broken up differently and it really bugged me.
• Tabs. This year the planner’s months are set off by tabs. Now, don’t think these are fancy tabs that stick out of the side of the book. They are more like thumb mark tabs you might find on Bibles that are pre-labeled.

What I don’t Love:

• Over all I really do love this planner, but there are a few things that I’ve had to either deal with or try to adapt:
• I don’t love that this calendar runs from July to June. I live in the Southern Hemisphere thus I school from January {or February} through December. That means that in order to use this planner I have to buy two to get one year’s use of it them.
• I wish the cover were plasticy. It’s made from heavy duty, shiny, card stock. But I’m rough on planners. They don’t sit on shelves, they are in the thick of it, on my table, shoved in my tote bags, & dragged along with me to various places. While the covers have never ripped the corners have gotten really dinged up! A plastic”y” cover would mean I could even wipe off spills if they occurred!
• Pockets. I wish there were a pocket or two inside the front or back cover. This is not the end of the world and I’m not going to get hung up about it, but I like to keep some things close at hand: directions for field trips, a receipt for the new curriculum I purchased in case I need to return it, tickets for an upcoming event. I’d love to be able to stick them in a pocket in my planner and know exactly where they are!
• Tabs. The new tabs are cool beans on the planner, but I like to break it down more. However, this is easily fixed by my handy reusable post-it note tabs. I simply label whatever I need labeled and place it within the planner where it needs to go: Month, Current Week, Notes, etc.
• Digital. Okay, I’ve said it 1,000 times or more that I’m not hugely into digital stuff. I’m not. It’s that simple. However, This planner use to be sold as a PDF and I miss that I can’t purchase it that way anymore. Why? Well, it wasn’t an issue to print out what pages I needed & bind them up, then purchase the remainders when they came out and add them to my planner. It also means less shipping for international users!

Things To Consider:

• As an overseas user I feel there are a few other things I’d like to add that are not dislikes, but things you might want to consider..
• Because the planner is set up for US based school years you’ll find that while there are pages for Semester Goals {before and after} there are enough for 2 Semesters. Where we live we have 4 Terms. You could perhaps just add a notebook paper in, run a copy off to stick in there, or just not use the form. The idea behind the planner is not to use every single part of it, but to use what you want and leave the rest.
• While the planner runs from July to June thus spanning say from 2013-2014 it still only covers a year. In the past when they sold digital versions it was easy enough to just print what you needed from one year’s pdf and then add from the next one as it was released. Because it’s not offered as a digital product anymore that’s not entirely possible. However you could unbind your planner and put it in a 3-ring binder, I haven’t because I love a spiral bound planner!

Bottom Line:

I really love this planner. I’d love to see a version of it created from January to December of any given year with 4 Terms within it, but I get why it’s created the way it’s created & it hasn’t stopped me from using it as it is!

Now for the Giveaway!

Well Planned Day is giving away one Family Planner to a Curriculum Choice reader! Just follow the instructions in the rafflecopter widget below…
a Rafflecopter giveaway

More Well Planned Day Planner Reviews:

• Family Planner by Cindy
• Family Planner and Student Planner by Tricia

If you’re looking for a review of the Student Well Planned Day Planner, hop on over to Kendra’s blog and check it out there.