Your Guide for Homeschool Planner
Bringing together your homeschool day
The 2Miles Homeschool Planner is your simple way to plan and organize your homeschool year.
No more writing and erasing daily plans. Reclaim your time and lay a foundation for the whole new school year.
What's Inside the Homeschool Planner
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368 pages that can hold records for 8 children
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Vision statement
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Daily schedule for each child
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12 Month planning pages
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Spiritual disciple pages
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Learning goal tracker
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A glimpse into your month
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Record pages for each child
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About your child​
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Things I love about <child>
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Book and Media log
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Habit Tracker
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Grade
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Attendance
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Extra activities
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Field trip log
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Subscriptions
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Budget
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Learning materials
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Note making pages
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Really cool stickers
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Colorful bookmark
Plan your year ahead in 5 steps
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Pray before you start.
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Create a vision that fits your family.
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Discuss the educational goals you have for each child.
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Design your homeschooling space. Organize space for your students. Encourage them to work independently.
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Plan how your daily schedule will look and design the grading system based on the curriculum/style of teaching you prefer .
Homeschool vision statement
Time to gather together as a family and discuss collectively the homeschool vision you have. The Bible says people without a vision will soon perish. It's true about Homeschooling too.
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Lay a strong foundation on why you choose to homeschool, what motivates you and what are the benefits of homeschooling. It's good to read this daily and remind ourselves on why we started this journey. On days when we almost want to quit, the vision statement can keep us going.
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You can enter vision statements in each of the hexagons - Spiritual, Mind/Body, Educational, Relationship.
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I have placed few examples here
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Spiritual: ​planting seeds of faith in my children, making them missional to reach the world with the good news, equipping children to serve wholeheartedly.
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Mind/body: to love the life and body God has given, to nourish and take care of it, teach them to think about what they think about, to make healthy food choices.
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Educational: helping kids see God's fingerprint in Math, Science, Language, Literature, Art and everything that comes with academics, Encouraging them to lean on God when something is difficult to understand and experience a breakthrough.
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Relationship: to care for siblings and elders, respect parents, to maintain good relationships with neighbors and people from different community.
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Daily Schedule
There are 8 schedule pages for a max of 8 children.
The grid page gives you the freedom to design your child's daily schedule.
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You can choose to create a grid layout or if you already have the structure for daily schedule in place, you can print it out and glue to to one of the sheet. Make sure you mention the name of your child on top of the page.
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If you are making a daily schedule for the very first time, it's good to list down all the activities your child is involved in throughout the day, group them and time box them.
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Click here to take you to the video link below
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Calendar
You will find 12 such month pages inside the planner. Start any time of the year. You can fill in the month's calendar days in the white boxes. There are 5 rows of weeks and each week starts with Monday and goes all the way till Sunday.
Each month have a chunk of pages that include - Spiritual discipline, learning goals tracker, refection of the past month. I have explained more about these below.
Spiritual discipline
Bible verse/passage for the month
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Choose a Scripture verse/passage for the month depending on the age group of the children. Older children can memorize a larger section of passage.
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You can either write it on the space given or choose to glue a printout of the verse(s).
Godly character objective of the month
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The aim is to teach our children the various character traits that are mentioned in the Bible. One of the curriculum that I use for homeschooling presents 90 character traits of Jesus. You can browse through the traits here and choose one for the month. (90 Character traits)
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Choose one of these traits and help them look for the dictionary meaning of the trait.
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Discuss with them on how to emulate the character trait.
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You can write down the various ways each of your child can live it out.
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Encourage them to look for opportunities where they can live it out.
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Song for the month
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Choose a song that you and your family would like to learn together. You can print it out and glue the page on the space given or write it down.
Cool Ideas:
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Choose any language
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Any old hymn, a psalm
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Use a musical instrument and sing along. (our hands and fingers make good music too!)
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How about writing a song?
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Prayer needs & Praise n Thanksgiving
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This is a good opportunity to teach our children to depend on the Lord for all their needs.
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Write down the prayer needs, with a date and go back to it each day.
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Write down the praise n thanksgiving for each of the prayer answered.
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This month's goal
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Write down the spiritual / academic / physical goal for each child.
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Quiet moments with God
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Encourage children to spend quiet time with God each morning. You can monitor their habit here and write down what they read. It will also give you openings to discuss something around what they read.
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It's best for children to see & learn how this is done. So help them get started by doing the quiet time with you.
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You can find Bible reading plans at Blue Letter Bible
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I have tried this Bible reading plan for kids and find it good for beginners.
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One of my closest friend fondly remembers seeing her mom spend quiet time with God at the kitchen table each morning. Actions speak louder than words. Our children are watching us live and what we are shouts louder than anything we can say. Won't you agree?
Learning goals tracker
Learning goals
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You can use these tracker pages as a lesson planning for each child.
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There are 16 sheets for each month. The planner can accommodate records for 8 children.
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Enter the date, subject and learning goals you want the child to achieve.
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Need review is a column to indicate if the child needs to revisit the concept again or not
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Mastered is a column use to indicate that the child has understood the concept correctly and can proceed to the next learning requirement.
Glimpse into your month
This is what we call the homeschool version of SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities and threats).
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However, here you will find the 4 sections as
Concepts learned
Note down the concepts your children learned. When you have this written, you are able to gauge the development and progress your child makes.
Top accomplishments
Identify your child's best and top accomplishments for the month. It's easy to remember the negatives, the failures and the disappointments. However, we need to make an effort to remember the good things as well.
Writing it down and looking back at it can encourage and lift us up and our children.
Challenge faced
This could be the challenges you/or your children faced during the month.
e.g difficulty in completing their daily goals, lack of good speed internet, regular power failure, health issues
What to change
Based on the challenges you faced, you can identify some of the corrective steps that can be taken. Pray and discuss together as a family how we can overcome or reduce certain events from reoccuring.
My Records
Record pages keep together your observation as you homeschool the year.
About your child
Keep a note of your child's strength, weakness and needs
Write down what you love about them. This can be a great keepsake page.
Book reading log
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This can serve as a reminder to what your child needs to read or has read.
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1 page for each child. So you have all together 8 pages of reading logs.
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When you come across a good read, you can quickly make a note of it here and slowly create a list of books that are appropriate for your child to read.
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Showing them the list of books they have read can definitely encourage them to read more..
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Habit tracker
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Each child matures according to their own rate and ability.
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The chart given in this page is a great way to keep a track of your child's rate of progress..
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There are 8 pages of habit tracker. 1 for each child.
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Especially when we homeschool our children, we may miss out to instill in them certain traits that they may need in order to work effectively in the future. You can conduct this evaluation after a working period of nine weeks.
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​It covers Work Habits, Social traits, Personal traits.
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The list of habit mentioned in the tracker is an adaptation of the habits mentioned in the ACE curriculum.)
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1 Adapted from ACE School of Tomorrow, (Home Educator’s Manual, Hendersonville, Accelerated Christian Education, Inc, 2018), p18
Grade
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This is a grid page to enable you to design your own grading system.
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There are 8 grading pages all together.
Attendance
Having an attendance record will hold both the educator and the student accountable to work towards the goal.
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There are in all 8 attendance pages (1 for each child). Now you can keep a track of each student's year in one page.
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Start making entries from the month you begin using the planner.
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e.g. if you started using the planner in the month of Aug you will start marking the attendance from Aug and move to the right each month. After you complete Dec, you can use the Jan, Feb, columns to make further entries.
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(I will remove the column names in the updated edition of this planner and that will give you complete control instead of making entries from the middle of the table and then circling back to Jan)
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Inorder to use the space in cells judiciously, it's recommended to use acronyms like
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A- Attended/P - Present, S- Sick days, H- Holidays, F- Field trip days, W-Weekends, N- No School
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At the bottom of the table you will notice a row that says Total. Here you can sum up the number of days you had school for the month.
Extra Activities
​There is always an abundance of extra activities that you can do when you homeschool.
The freedom of homeschooling lets you pursue many such opportunities which is otherwise limited to traditional schooling system.
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For each child, the layout spreads across the left and right hand side page of your planner.
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There are 6 columns on the left side and 6 on the right side.
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Similar to the attendance pages, you can start making entries from the month you begin using the planner.
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e.g. if you started using the planner in the month of Aug you will start marking the attendance from Aug and move to the right each month. After you complete Dec, you can use the Jan, Feb, columns to make further entries.
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(I will remove the column names in the updated edition of this planner and that will give you complete control instead of making entries from the middle of the table and then circling back to Jan)
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You can use abbreviations for each activity and also record the number of hours spent on that day. e.g. Piano lessons for 1 hr can be written as P1. If you have multiple entries to be made for the same day, it's recommended to adjust the size of letters inside the box. e.g. you can write P1/ S1.5 for Piano lessons 1 hour / Soccer practice 1.5 hours
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Tracking extra activities is a great way to record credits earned for older children.
Field trip log
These are fun days children look forward to.
Keep a track of the field trip plans - when you want to go, where you would like to visit, and some additional notes about the place and needs for travel incase you need to book the place well in advance.
Subscriptions
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This is a place to store all the details of your subscriptions that you use for homeschool needs.
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It could be an online app, magazine, software.
Note: I don't recommend writing down the user id/ password for security reasons. However, a space for the same has been given.
Budget
It's best to keep a track of what is spent on homeschooling. This will help you set aside a budget for the next year.
Budgeting is also a great skill to teach children early on.
Learning materials
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List down all the materials you use to facilitate learning. - school supplies, books/curriculum, learning materials
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School supplies: pencils, crayons, pens, grips, scissors, glue, markers etc
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Books/Curriculum: Apart from the curriculum that you choose, you may have purchased additional books to supplement learning. These could be dictionaries, study guides, books to prep for competitive exams, science magazines, additional writing resources etc.
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Learning materials: Software, app, laptop, pictures, flash cards, charts, magnetic board, white board, etc.
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Click the video to learn tips on how to use our
Homeschool Planner