I found this adorable and easy to make file folder kit with detailed instructions on Currclick for free here. In case that expires, you can also find it in the files section at the Workboxes Yahoo! group for free.

This kit was made by Donna, creator of Teacher Book Bag, a site with inexpensive and sometimes free activities that I hope to explore more in the future.

The instructions come with pictures and are very simple to follow. You just need a single file folder in the color of your choice. I just bought a lamination machine, and plan to laminate the states and capitals cards for extra durability.

This is useful to us because this year, we are beginning the first half of the Trail Guide to US Geography series, with the intention of completing the second half in Grade 7. I had thought about buying the States and Capitals Wrap-ups as a hands-on memorization aid, but that didn’t quite match up to our studies, in that he’d have to work on capitals of states he wasn’t studying. This is a neat, storable alternative that can be used again and again to reinforce skills. It also comes with a blank US map for map drills. And it’s free, which is always a plus in my book

I have bright blue and bright red paper; I think I’ll print the states out in blue and the capitals in red, for a nice little matching game kind of thing to put in our workboxes. Good times!

I know there are a lot of great tools out there for homeschool planning and organization of your daily lesson plans, transcripts, etc. Just a few off the top of my head that I know of are the the free Homeschool Sked Track, the free and paid versions of Homeschool Tracker and the $99/year planner from Simply Charlotte Mason. I’ve heard rave reviews about both of those, but I’m on a very tight budget as a single parent homeschooler and I’m going to keep it real: if I’m going to spend $40-100 on homeschool materials, it’s not going to be on something that keeps ME organized; it’s going to be on books and materials for Shorty.

My real issue with all of these is that being a highly visual-kinesthetic person, I feel better having written things down by hand vs. typing them into a computer, and more easily and quickly understand things if I can flip a few pages and skim rather than click around. If that doesn’t sound like you, I encourage you to check out the above sites; they all come well-reviewed!

Anyway, with that criteria in mind – cheap/free, visually-based and flexible – this is how I put together Shorty’s portfolio this year.

First, I started with Donna Young’s Planning Forms. If you are new to planning for homeschool, I recommend reading her Planning for Beginners page. She also has some good advice there about how to customize your portfolio and has many free printable options. It’s one of my favorite homeschooling sites ever!

Andrea’s Step-by-Step Homeschool Planning and Portfolio Organization Method

There are lots of ways to do this, but this is how I’ve approached it each year. Doing this over the summer helps keep us on track all year long and saves me a lot of time and effort.

1. I start with a 3″ or 4″ binder with sleeves, and insert a nice cover page in the front of the binder that I make in Word, something with nice school-related clip art, and my son’s name, grade and school year underneath in nice font.
2. The first page of my portfolio inside is a printed calendar of the school year.
3. I put this in a plastic protector sleeve back to back with an attendance form. Not everyone has to keep track of attendance, but our umbrella school requires it. I use her basic form because that’s all my umbrella school requires. I write in the date every day we “do school.”
4. If you need to keep track of the time spent doing school, she’s got forms for that, too.
5. I put in a simple book and media list of my choice and write in all the books and educational media Shorty sees that year. (Her disclaimer at the top of that page always makes me laugh.)
6. This is different than a course of study planner, which is the list of the main books, curricula and materials you’re planning to use that year for each subject.
7. Some people like to put in their yearly goals and objectives for each child. I am not one of those people, by the way. But it is a requirement in some states.
8. This year is Shorty’s first year of junior high, so I am also keeping a transcript. Or, y’know, I’m going to attempt it.
9. If you want to keep up with grades and attendance, Mrs. Young has a wonderful quickstart guide for doing so.

Whew! And we haven’t even gotten to the actual planning part! Brace yourselves, y’all, we’re going in!

Guide to Free Yearly Lesson Planners

In the past, I’ve found Mrs. Young’s planning and portfolio sets very helpful. We liked the Portfolio Set, which includes a matching book list and field trip log.

I also really like the straightforward curriculum planner from OldFashionedEducation.com, which we used all last year and this summer and doubled as a sort of checklist.

However, this year I discovered Sue Patrick’s Workbox System of homeschool organization and both Shorty and I are quite hooked. Read more about the system on my blog here.

However, I couldn’t find a planner that I could use BOTH to plan my workbox contents, including academic and “fun” stuff, AND could also go in my portfolio for Shorty as a record or log of EVERYTHING we’re doing, not just stuff that goes in the boxes, but also field trips, music lessons, artist and composer studies, family devotionals and read-alouds, and other projects.

Readers of this blog may recall that I had previously made a plain workbox planner with 5 days per page, plus a space for notes, but what about everything else? I’d need a second log to keep track of our school day completely, which seemed redundant and confusing.

So of course, I had to make my own workbox planner that doubled as a portfolio planner and record keeper. Here it is!

Right-click and save:

Andrea's Portfolio Planner w/ Name and Date (118)
This has the  student name and date across the top of each week, helpful if you have more than one child.

Andrea's Portfolio Planner w/ Term, Week & Date (97)
This one is best for one child, with space for the term, week, and date across the top of each page.

This is a weekly portfolio planner for use with the workbox system, with 5 days scheduled and 12 boxes per day, one for each box, plus space below each day to write the things you do with your child that doesn’t go in the boxes, and a sixth space for notes for that week.

I print these out front and back to a page and hole-punch them and plan to stick them in the portfolio binder as a detailed record of what we have done this year.

Some people like to print this one week at a time. I like to plan, so I print out entire years in advance and fill them in subject by subject with a pencil. If I ever need to change anything, I can just erase.

This is free to use as-is, just abide by my terms of use and do not upload it to any other site without asking first.

Since people asked on my last one, I am able to create custom planners for individual families’ needs and preferences, including changing the words, colors, background shades, fonts, numbers of boxes, custom graphics, etc., for a small fee per custom planner. Please contact me if you’re interested in that, but in the meantime, this all-purpose basic planner is here for free and will work for most people. Enjoy!

Shorty will be doing Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy course as his science this year, and between that and the wonderful notebook/workbook, I was out nearly $70 even discounted through Rainbow Resource. Still, I wanted to buy him a telescope or something through which he could stargaze better, so I looked around for what low-cost options there were out there.

After much seeking, I found the Galileoscope, a low-cost, high-quality telescope specifically designed to expand the world of astronomy for children who might not be able to afford higher end telescopes. Here’s a picture and a description from the web site:

The Galileoscope™ is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. No matter where you live, with this easy-to-assemble, 50-mm (2-inch) diameter, 25- to 50-power achromatic refractor, you can see the celestial wonders that Galileo Galilei first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today. These include lunar craters and mountains, four moons circling Jupiter, the phases of Venus, Saturn’s rings, and countless stars invisible to the unaided eye. The Galileoscope costs just US$15 each plus shipping for 1 to 99 units, or US$12.50 each plus shipping for 100 or more.

(Image courtesy of the Discover Magazine Blog.)

Best of all, you can donate one anonymously for just $12.50 with no shipping charges, and they will send one to an underprivileged child in either the US or in another country, so if you can spare the extra $12.50, you can open up an amazing world of discovery and the night sky for a needy child somewhere.

Read all about the Galileoscope here, and hurry if you’re going to buy one – they’re raising the prices August 10! Not by too much, but still.

Hopefully this helps someone out there with a budding astronomer in their household.

A few weeks ago while making my usual round of approximately 47273423 homeschooling blogs, I stumbled upon the concept of organizing your child’s day with Sue Patrick’s Workbox System. It is a highly hands-on and visual means of organizing your child’s activities, organizing yourself as a homeschooling mom, using what resources you have more effectively, and fostering independence, fun and self-direction in the child.

The workbox system has become something of a fad in the homeschooling blogosphere and there is an overwhelming amount of information out there, so I’m going to let Sue Patrick tell you herself in her own presentation how the system works, even though she and I have very different worldviews.

There are lots more links to look at. I liked this post by Tracey in Australia because she has a sort of FAQ about workboxes, with pictures of her own. There is a wonderful and very busy Yahoo! group with many helpful people that will answer your questions and give you suggestions. The book comes with access to tons of free printables, including everything you need to make the components of the system.

This system works with any curriculum and any style of homeschooling – from unschooling to Classical to everything in between. We have been using our own version with magazine racks instead of the clear plastic bins, and it has been a huge hit with Shorty. It gives him a sense of independence and personal responsibility while providing him with structure and predictability in a highly visual-spatial way that he enjoys so much he’s declared it “genius”.

I plan what I put in each box by using a grid I made, which has a 4×3 square box of cubes for each day. The cubes correspond to which box is where, and I simply fill in what I’m going to have Shorty do that day, using a separate planner for guidance and an “idea file” for the fun/ center/ enrichment boxes that I’ve been keeping.

Here is the workbox planner I made, in PDF format. Sue Patrick has one, but this was my method of making it more visual for myself. Please right-click and save to your hard drive. It’s free to use; you can either laminate it and use an erasable marker to fill it in week by week, or if you’re a planning freak like me, you can print out one for each week of your school year

Andrea's 5-day workbox planner (401)

UPDATE: Please see my other tools for portfolio planning with workboxes on my downloads page!

Please feel free to link to this post if you’d like to share this workbox planner with others, but please, don’t upload this to any other web site without letting me know first.

Here are some more helpful links about this system:

Workboxes Yahoo! group – indispensable,with tons of printables.
Teacher File Box – membership site with thousands of printable activities and centers for workboxes (it’s only 99 cents to join)
Workbox FAQ by Tracey
Another detailed explanation w/ pictures
Workboxes with Sterilite drawers, with pictures of how she breaks down her curriculum for each drawer
An excellent and thorough explanation
What’s in the Box? – Idea blog for workboxes
Preschool activity bags for workboxes for littles
Laura’s Ziploc Baggie Method
Another Mom’s sterilite drawers

It’s ironic that I say this, as she’s quite adamant that you try her system to a T, but due to extreme space limitations (I live in a tiny 1BR apartment) I had to go with magazine racks instead. I’ll try to upload pictures of what our set up looks like. In the meantime, I hope this information is a blessing to people out there the way it has been for me. As a single parent who home educates, I’ve often found it challenge to manage my time so that Shorty gets EVERYTHING he wants to do, done, and I do, too. This is definitely helping me do that, and for that alone, it’s worth its weight in gold.