So I am now 5 weeks in to my planning for the coming school year.  It is amazing to me how I feel as though I have accomplished a lot, and yet hardly anything at all.  I am wondering if despite all this hard work, I will even be ready by Sept 12th.  My main focus has been on Chloe (grade 7) and Jayden (grade 3) because they are the ones I am planning all 36 weeks for.  Will I have time to get anything ready for Ava (Kindergarten)?  I hope so!

Here are some more points of interest I have noted while working with this new system:

• I usually copy all consumables double sided to save on paper. I cannot do this with the crate system therefore the amount of papers seem bulky.
• Using paper clips to hold subjects together is helpful in keeping each thing separate.
• Having an index card or a half sheet of paper on top of each subject with a summary of plans for each week will help refresh my memory when the time comes to use the plans I have created.
• Something I have not yet figured out yet is how to handle shared subjects in Homeschool Tracker +.  For instance our Explorer Unit Study is for both Jayden and Chloe.  In HST+ I put it under Jayden’s school year, not Chloe’s because I am not sure how to easily do that.  I figured when I move each item to the current week, I will make a copy of it then for the other child.

This week I am currently finishing up the Explorers Unit Study, then I will do Mind Benders (Critical Thinking), and I hope to dive in to either the Africa Unit Study or First Language Lessons. I ordered Chloe’s Teaching Textbooks but won’t get it for a little bit yet due to it having been a preorder and they are just starting to ship this week. Then each week I will add music lessons, Roller Typing, Rosetta Stone Spanish, and physical education, as well as art at least once a month.

I also wanted to make a side note about our Explorers Unit Study. I found the basis of this unit on HomeschoolShare. It is a great site for free unit studies on different books, as well as many broader topics.

I used this in conjunction with some hands on explorer projects from a Scholastic book. It was easy to split into 18 weeks (2 semesters) with the addition of a Leif Ericsson week and one or two of the explorers (Christopher Columbus) taking 2 weeks. We even side track for some activities on latitude and longitude that I am looking forward too!

Planning/Filing/Crate System Series

Also be sure to check out all the articles in this Planning/Filing/ Crate System Series!

• Part I – This Post
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Learning to Let Go