For most of this school year, Jaden (my 8th grader) has been using a weekly assignment planner to help him organize his schoolwork. The planner form has evolved a bit since I first introduced it to him at the beginning of the year, being tweaked weekly until it met both Jaden's needs and my own.
As you can see from the sample planner above (click to enlarge the image), I include general assignments for each subject without page or lesson numbers, such as "read 2 chapters" or "complete one lesson." That way I don't have to redo the assignments completely each week. To keep Jaden accountable for his work, however, he does have to fill in exactly what pages or lesson he completed.
Jaden really likes the independence this planner gives him. I write down what his assignments are and how many times a week he needs to do them, but he can choose which days of the week he actually completes them.
The sample above is what his planner would look like at the end of Monday. You can see where Jaden put checkmarks to mark the days he wants to do a particular assignment. And when he finished the assignment for the day, he filled in the box and recorded the actual pages read or time spent.
Download the Weekly Assignment Planner
If you'd like to download a copy of the weekly planner to print out, just click here for a cutomizable PDF version. You're welcome to customize it and save it and print it as many times as you'd like for your personal use. Click on the image below to see what the blank form looks like.
Looks like you've come up with a nice thing that's fluid (thanks to those blank areas). We use Homeschool Tracker, a free bit of software, to keep track of what our girls are doing. I confess, I'm typically behind in keeping track, largely because they're elementary aged and the records from these years aren't critical to anything in particular like, say, college admission. But I notice the program also has a schedule printout – I haven't used it yet. Just thought I'd mention it. 🙂
@Jen, Actually, I own Homeschool Tracker Plus and I used it for quite a while. In fact the main reason I got it was so that I could print off the daily to-do lists for the kids. But I just couldn't keep up with rescheduling things when our school days got moved around and delayed. That and the software only works on PCs and I'm a Mac girl, and even though I can run Windows software on my Mac, it got to be too much trouble.
That being said, I'm sure I'll be breaking out HST again since my son will be in high school next year. That's one thing that HST is good at — record keeping! I'm sure I'll be thankful I own it.
That's pretty much why I didn't do our scheduling with it. Our schedule is so fluid – I go in with a plan, but things come up. (Check out my post about "when homeschoolers go unsupervised" for some idea.) http://jenpb.blogspot.com/2010/11/when-homeschoolers-go-unsupervised.html
But other people are way more organized than I am, and good about sticking with their plans. I had a young life that was full of strict schedules, so I suppose I'm rebelling a bit…I don't THINK of it as rebelling, of course. 🙂
Wow, Joy! I really love this. I'm going to give this a try. We currently use daily assignment sheets, but I hate how much paper/ink we use for it (even when we use scrap paper). Thanks for sharing!
Over here from The Happy Housewife. Thank you for this resource. I have two 7th graders and the last couple of weeks have been researching how to get them to take on more of the independent work status that high school will require. I downloaded the customizable format and look forward to using it with them. Thank you again!
thanks I have been asking my husband to make something like this for me for a couple of weeks. He has been so busy he hadn't had time. I am going to give it a try.
Thank you very much for this planner. I will be using it with my two up and coming 8th graders. Truly appreciate it.
I have been looking for a weekly calander that I loved and finally found it! Thank you!
We started using your weekly assignment printable this year and the kids are really enjoying it. I just wrote a post about planning for the year and I linked this post. I hope it will send some traffic your way as a thank you!
Amy
Thank you for this! It's exactly what I need!!!
Thank you so much for the planner. Just what we needed, and it saved me tons of research and prep time!
You have saved my sanity! I am not good at making printables– no time, no knowledge, no skill. This is what I was about to throw away endless hours trying to accomplish. Ok, so maybe it didn't look exactly like this in my brain, but it accomplishes the same goal. I'm so thankful for your skills.