Homeschool / Life Planning : Being Intentional

One of my goals for this next school year is to be more organized and intentional with how we spend our time.

I used to do most of my planning and scheduling on my phone.  But I didn’t find it to be very effective outside of keeping track of my calendar appointments and such.  Physically writing things down seems to work better for me. 

I ended up making a planner for myself because I wanted to be able to include all of the aspects that were important and valuable to me.  So I just put together some basic designs, printed them out and put them in this little binder portfolio thing.  

I’ve been using my planner for about a month now and it has been so helpful!  It’s amazing how being intentional with my time and being more organized helps things to go more smoothly.

 

I have the basics like a calendar for each month, an outline for each day, and meal planning pages.

I also made some pages to help me to make a plan for school each month, especially in regards to the Well-Educated Heart rotation.  I wanted to include a list of resources to check each month so I don’t forget that I have them.   

The other thing that I included in my planner is a weekly learning log.  I mapped out 9 things that are important to me and that I really want us to include in our week: Music, Art, Nature, Poetry, Story, Record Keeping, Life Skills, Spiritual, and Building Zion.  

Then each day, I jot down a quick note about what we did in those categories.  This helps me to visually see what we’re consistent with including and what I could be more intentional with including more of.  

So far, after doing this for a few weeks, I have noticed that jotting things down in this learning log really helps me to intentionally plan and add these things into our day.  Most of these are super simple, like playing classical music while we notebook (music & record keeping), playing a game with the kids (building Zion), or teaching the kids how to measure flour while we make muffins (life skills). 

The weekly learning log helps to motivate me to do things on purpose, and because of this, we have been even more consistently and deeply immersed in the arts lately which has been a balm to our souls in this crazy world.   

The learning log also acts a journal of sorts to document snippets from our days, which I think will be fun to look back on later.