Why I Switched...Spiral Notebooks to Charts (Homeschool)

I read a post awhile ago about using spiral notebooks to write assignments for kiddos.  The idea was by writing them down you'd have a good idea of how long their assignments would take as well as making it an easy way to have accountability for completion.  I thought this was the best idea ever so I ran with it.

During her first and second grade year this was the method we used.  I ran into two problems...
1. I can't do one day at a time... I don't have the discipline to do it every night and I really like to plan so it ended up with weeks being done at a time. 

2. Heaven forbid we fall behind.

It was a mess.  Things were crossed off and written on the next day.  We skipped days of school to catch up in the one subject we were behind in.  The problems were silly, but they were real.  When she started third grade and I had a new first grader the prospect of trying to maintain this method with two kids seemed SO overwhelming.  I didn't think I could keep up. 

I wrote out about a thousand different plans over the summer.  I had two kids that I needed to keep "on schedule".   Two of their subjects were going to be done together so I had to make sure they were keeping up.  I needed something with more flexibility.  So I made charts.  Because who doesn't love a good chart.

This is an example of Grace's chart for this year.  Her subjects are listed down the side and the days of the week across the top.  I filled in what days I expected that she would complete the various subjects with Monday and Wednesday being heavily weighted and Thursday, aka library day, having next to nothing.  I gave myself blank lines to write in page numbers or lesson numbers. 

With this method I take her binder (which holds the math chapter and portion of English worktext she is working on) and write the information for MONDAY in her chart.  As we check off completed items on Monday, we fill in Tuesday.  And so it goes.  No sitting down later trying to make a plan, no trying to flip through pages to make sure we caught everything.  Her entire week was on one page. 

If we needed to make something up, we just didn't X out the box.  And the next day she finished that assignment as well.  If she wanted to work ahead, it was easy to fill things in to see where she needed to go (she's an overachiever like that.)  This system has served us SO well.  We haven't forgotten any curriculum, we haven't missed any key lessons.  Everything is easy to assign, easy to record and easy to check off!

With four kids next year, I'm excited for the ease of this system and how NOT crazy it makes me! :)