Homeschool Planet from Homeschool Buyers Co-op is an amazing homeschooling planner. You can plan anything and everything! If you're like me, you have tried tons of other online planners. They were either too confusing, too time consuming, or just plan not worth the effort you had to put into them. I would just give up and resort back to a good, old paper planner. I have been looking for an easy to set up planner and I have found it!
Let me introduce you to Homeschool Planet!
Homeschool Planet is an online planner that allows you to plan and organize your life. Each family member is added to the planner. Details about each family member is added....name, grade level, email address, phone numbers, and you can even add a photo for each member. Once all the basic information is added, you can get started with the planning and scheduling.
Homeschool Planet is easy to set up. It does take some time to get everything entered, but it is so worth it! All you have to do is log in and you can immediately start to add all your information. Students, classes, books, lessons, etc. You can track students attendance, grades, and assignments. This is a great way to keep track of information for end of year reporting or transcripts.
There are 3 ways to view you planner.
Calendar
The Calendar View shows you everyone's or a particular person's schedule for the month, week, or day. You can see what classes you child has planned. Co-op classes that need to be attended.
All the activities have different colors. This makes it extremely easy to know what is planned by just a quick look.
Planner
The Planner View is your log of everything. It's your list of appointments, chores, activities, sport games, practices, vacations, field trips, etc. Whatever you have added to it.
This is great because it makes the planner very specific to your family and your needs.
You can choose to show the list for everyone or just one of you. You have the option to view it daily, weekly, and monthly. It's easy to read and follow.
You'll have no excuse for forgetting an appointment now.
An added bonus of the planner is you'll get an email reminder of any upcoming events.
No matter where I am, I can see what we have planned just be looking at my phone!
A mobile version is available for smartphones and tablets too.
Resource
The Resource View show you a list of textbooks, workbooks, books, websites, CD's, DVD's that you will be using for you lessons for the school year.
This has been a great help to me. I always made a list of materials for the upcoming school year in a notebook and then every year I would lose the notebook. Not very helpful in the long run.
When you log into the website, you see your dashboard. At the top of the dashboard are tabs.
Reports, Helpers, Print, Settings, Help
Under Reports, you'll find Assignment lists, Class notes, Grade reports, Class hours, and Transcripts. These reports can be printed out for record keeping.
The next tab is Helpers. Here you will find two choices. Rescheduling and Grading Helper. Rescheduling is great for moving a missed or overdue assignment. Grading Helper is just that a helper for grading. Since we are not doing our usual load during the summer I haven't had to use either of these two choices yet. I'm sure this will come in very handy this year.
Print is the next tab. This gives you the option of printing out the current page. You can choose black & white or colored. When the page prints out, it is a nice clean print. None of the side bar content or images are on the page. This is a great way to give your kids their own print out of what lessons they need to complete for the day. Perfect for teaching kids accountability.
The next tab is Settings. I think this is probably the most important tab. You will be in this section a lot when setting up you school and lessons.
Here you will set up all the information about your school.
Under the General tab, you can set up the school's name, date preference, time, email notification, etc.
After filling in the general information, you can get started with setting up your School Year. Selecting the days off and when school will start and end are two important steps.
Next, you'll add the Subjects being covered for the school year. You can add other activities too. Co-op classes, sport practices, choir, religious classes, and church.
After that, you can decide on your Grading system. Are you going to grade? Are you giving tests or quizzes? You can set it up to however you would like it.
You can even track your Class Hours. Here you have the option of tracking the hours your students spend in class. You can track by hours or by assignments.
Under the Share tab, you have the option of syncing Homeschool Planet to your spouses, kids, or your own google calendar. I don't use my google calendar much but this would be a great way to keep the entire family on schedule. You can also send the Homeschool Planet to your google calendar.
The last tab is Theme. Here you can even change the color and theme of your planner. There are 18 themes to choose from.
The set up process takes the longest. It isn't hard. It's rather easy but it does require some time.
The Help tab is there for when you need help. If you can't figure something out or find something, just click on the help tab. I'll be honest I haven't had to use it. The planner is that easy to use.
Once you have your classes set up, you can start adding your lessons.
This step is simple and fairly easy to do. I messed up with a day off and had to fix the schedule. I was worried at first. I thought I would have to rework the whole schedule for the year by hand. But I didn't! Once I fixed the days off, the planner asked me if I wanted to adjust any skipped days. Of course, I said yes and it fixed it all by itself. I was ready to cheer from my seat in the living room. Past planners I have used had me reworking the entire schedule by myself. It gets very tiring and tedious to clip and paste 180 days of schoolwork!
So What Did I Think of the Homeschool Planet?
LOVED, LOVED, LOVED IT! I loved it like happy dance love. I know, I know.... I'm a little strange but I loving planning! I am a planner. I love to plan our school year and lessons. I don't use one style of curriculum or company, so having a planner that makes my planning easier is a gift from Heaven. At least it feel like that. I have tried various online planners but never found one I liked completely. I always went back to my paper planner. I even purchased it again this year because I didn't want to get my hopes to high with this planner. Now I'm wondering what to do with my paper planner!
For me, the setting up classes and imputing lesson plans took the most time. It's time consuming but aren't all planners? Set was easy to do. Everything was pretty self explanatory. Homeschool Planet doesn't frustrate you at all! I am half-way done with my planning for this year. I can wait for school to start so I can see how the lessons and grading options really work.
I am so happy, no thrilled, that I have been given the opportunity to review and share this amazing planner with you!
If you are looking for an online planner, I can't recommend enough Homeschool Planet. Right now, you can get a 3 month free trail! You don't need a credit card for you free trail. A one year subscription is just $65! If after your free trail you decide to keep using the planner all your information will be there. Stored, saved, and ready for you to continue on.
Want to learn more about the homeschool planner?
Check out their social media pages.
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