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This FREE printable homeschool day planner includes a cute template for selecting and organizing your daily activities! It makes mapping out your week super easy!
How It Works
This checklist is so easy. On Sunday nights, I print out 5 of these, one for each day. As I’m thinking of what I want to do for the week, I just plug my ideas into the spaces. On the actual day, we just go through the list, checking off each activity as we go along!
Read this article for more information on how we schedule each particular day.
There’s a reason I do 5 days at once. Search “gross motor activities for preschoolers” on Pinterest. Thousands of amazing ideas, right? It only takes 2 minutes to pick my 5 favorites and write them each on a separate checklist for the week. Up next? Fine motor activities for preschoolers. Easy.
Searching for activities the night before just isn’t as efficient. (Our time is so limited!) When I’ve tried it this way, I end up finding so many amazing activities I want to try and wasting way too much time trying to select the best one.
Features
Art Project OR Sensory Play
Let’s be realistic. Homeschool days go by SO fast. We never get through all the cool things we want to try. So this homeschool day planner is simplified to match what we can actually finish in a single day.
At first, I used to try to do an art project and a sensory play/science project on the same day… in addition to everything else. It never happened, and I just felt discouraged and overwhelmed. Both require so much setup and clean up! So my homeschool day planner recommends only choosing ONE of those activities per day. And you don’t need to choose wild messy art projects or super involved science projects every single day. I usually do one more complicated activity per week. The rest are pretty simple—painting with water outside, a sensory bin filled with different colors of dry beans, playing with slime, etc.
Practical Life Activity
With little kids, it’s important that they learn more than just academics, and explicitly naming on my schedule the practical skill I want to work on helps me remember to integrate it in a little each day. I usually do just ONE practical life skill for the week, and we work on it every day that week. In my sample, I listed “putting on shoes.” This could also be things like:
- drinking out of an open cup without spilling
- tying shoes
- using a zipper
- potty training
- brushing own teeth
- dialing 911, plus learning when to call and when not to (for older children)
- learning home address and phone number
- washing vegetables
- set the table
- fold a t-shirt
- coughing and sneezing into elbow
Obviously many of these are things a kid won’t master in just one week, but having a goal to practice just one of them every day will help get your kiddo closer and closer!
Social & Emotional Learning Activity
It’s really important for kids to have “class” on social and emotional learning in order to develop emotional intelligence and become the most empathetic kids they can be. This focus in our homeschool day planner is just like the focus on a practical skill each day—having a goal and a written reminder helps keep you on track to teach beyond just academics!
For this “class,” we do things like:
- learning emotion names
- talking about how to appropriately react with each feeling
- ‘I Love You’ Rituals
- discussing how OTHERS feel and why (on a walk: “That puppy looks so happy sleeping in the sunshine. Look at that huge smile! Animals like it when it’s sunny. Remember when it was raining last week, and the puppy was all cold and soggy and trying to hide from the rain under the porch? Animals are really sad when it’s cold and rainy.”
- activities on how to be a good friend, like sending care packages
- practicing taking care of others
- deep breathing exercises
- reading books about social justice
Anything related to love (for ourselves and others!) is perfect in this category on your checklist.
How to Print
Want your pages to look just like the image above? Make sure you print out your pages borderless so they don’t have white margins.
Want to save some ink, but still have your planner look beautiful? If you print the pages WITH a white border (the default on most printers), you will still get some of the flower design, just less!
Save Ink & Paper on Either Option
At first, I just printed 5 pages a week and wrote on them normally. But it was so much paper and ink! (And trust me… I already use a TON of both.)
New method! Now I have 5 pages that are laminated, and I write on them with fine tip dry erase markers and clean them all off at the end of the week. After a few months, they do start to get a little bit murky, but reprinting them every few months is better than reprinting every week! I also print mine on cardstock so they’re sturdier.
I hope you enjoy this free homeschool day planner and start to feel more organized and in control of your homeschool curriculum!
Looking for a comprehensive homeschool planner in this same style? Find the full 30 page planner here for only $4.
