The Online Homeschool Planner that Converted this Pen and Paper Mom

The following is a review of Homeschool Planet. I received the product for free and was compensated for my time to create the review. All opinions are honest, and my own.

There are few habits that stuck around after I left the IT field, and one of them is that I love finding great tools to make my life easier. I will spend hours upon hours sometimes trying to find the “just right” tool for anything, whether it’s homeschooling, blogging, homemaking, or a DIY project. I need an efficient homeschool planner because with three kids 4 and under, my time is limited.

Homeschool lesson planning is a big deal, especially in high school. No longer can I let forgotten lessons slide in the effort to work toward the bigger picture. I need the fine details to be sorted out, and again with little kids, sometimes those fine details get the best of me. So, I had to switch from my pen and paper ways that I was so fond of, to something that was going to keep both me and Kira, my teenaged daughter, accountable.

Realizing we needed an online homeschool planner

Last year I went the free route and used printed paper planners to schedule out our homeschool year, with a paper planner for Kira to use as well. I thought I had figured it all out, and it was going to work great. In theory, it was a great system! Then, reality happened. With an overbooked schedule, renting out our home and buying another, the paper system failed us and we needed something that couldn’t get lost, and would remind my daughter if she did in fact forget a lesson the previous day.

Even without the busy year, grading work was terrible. I felt like I was buried under paper, constantly tracking down the missing piece and wasting precious time finding what I needed just to finish grading. In the end the paper system was painful, and barely worked.

Finding the perfect daily homeschool planner

I can tell you that just like other tools, I spent a LONG time searching for the perfect planner, and even before being presented with the opportunity to review Homeschool Planet, I chose it for our family months ago. There are some key elements that made Homeschool Planet stick out from the crowd:

• The price is extremely reasonable, and can be paid either monthly or yearly
• You can schedule multiple students easily, with both mirrored assignments, and individual assignments
• Missed work is alerted to the parent, and you can choose to reschedule it
• Easily set up scheduling based on certain repeat patterns
• Separate logins for each student
• Weighted grading available
• Daily and/or weekly digest can email you the assignment list
• I love Homeschool Buyers Co-op overall, so they already had my trust in providing something of quality

I looked far and wide for the perfect homeschool planning software, and Homeschool Planet stuck out with far more features than any other planner I considered.

Better, faster, easier homeschool organizer

Now that we’ve been using Homeschool Planet for the entire year, I can’t imagine going back. Why?

• I set up the lesson plan in a fraction of the time because I can enter in patterns and have it populate out to the entire school year. I think math took me 10 minutes to plan the whole year!
• I no longer need to match up the assignment sheet to the grade sheet. It’s all one tool!
• I can text myself a shopping list, right from Homeschool Planet!
• While I’m grading assignments, if something needs to be redone, I can just mark it as incomplete, and it goes back into the lesson plan as a missed assignment. The rescheduling tool will then alert me and ask me how I want to reschedule it.

Creating a homeschool transcript

This year we are sending out applications that require Kira’s high school transcript, and I’m so thankful we have Homeschool Planet to pull this together so easily! I can enter in information from last year (when I wasn’t using Homeschool Planet), Kira’s outside classes, and it automatically pulls in the grades from within Homeschool Planet as well. I never thought creating a transcript would be so easy!

Even if you’re like me, and you love a pen and paper planner, somethings are just best done with an online tool. Homeschool Planet offers a 30 day free trial, so there’s really no risk in giving it a try for yourself!

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