Tony Silva
The Schoolhouse Planner
$39.95 available at The Schoolhouse Store


For many of us, The Old Schoolhouse magazine is the gold standard for homeschool resources.

Where content is concerned, that standard carries over to the magazine’s other publications. Their E-Book, “The Schoolhouse Planner”, is an excellent example. This E-Book is a great buy – but not for reason’s you would expect from a product with “planner” in its name.

“The Schoolhouse Planner” suffers from the disadvantages inherent in large electronic documents published in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) – limited usability. PDF is a wonderful tool that enables publishers to make documents such as fill-in forms, user manuals and presentations available to both PC and Mac users. In spite of its awkward user interface, PDF remains a popular format for E-Books because it is more secure and “portable” than any other format.

While being published in a PDF makes “The Schoolhouse Planner” impractical as a true planner, the format is ideal for storing information like articles, Web links and fill-in forms and that is really what the planner is at its soul. Take out the calendars (which can print out as two pages split down the middle of Wednesday) and some of the fill-in planning tools (which may not include details you want… or may include details you do not want), and what you have is hundreds of pages of great tips, monthly theme ideas, and lesson planning, organizing and curriculum resources.

The format’s greatest strength is its full-text search capability. You will find this useful for locating resources as they appear in the planner on a month by month basis keyed to themes for each month. Planning resources are grouped logically and there are forms for everything from menu planning to instructions for the baby sitter. The forms in the planner can be filled in on your computer. To find the fill-in fields, you can click on the “Highlight Fields” button in the upper right corner of each page. After attempting to fill in a few forms, you may find it easier to simply print them out and fill them in by hand. Most of the text boxes fill in from the center of the field. It is a feature that takes some getting used to.

The planner is a treasure trove of homeschool knowledge and experience. You may do things differently, or find the forms more or less detailed than you like. What we found was a wealth of ideas about how homeschool planning can be done – a springboard to developing our own planning system using the tools that come with any home computer system these days. If you’re in the market for a planner because you don’t think you can create your own, give this one a look. If you want to create your own planner and need a top notch resource for ideas you can put to use right away, “The Homeschool Planner” is definitely the place to start.
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