One might think, by my title, that I’m referring to one uber-cheesey chick flick (which I have not seen). One would be wrong.

Instead, I’m referring to the notebooks I made for each of my kids for this school year. And I wouldn’t even bother posting about them except that I’ve been asked to expound on what the heck I’m talking about by a couple of real-life friends and I figured if I was going to explain it all, I might as well just Explain It All. To you, too.

As Maddie is a 5th grader this year and Millie is officially of proper kindergarten age I did the only thing any self-respecting homeschool mama would do. I panicked. For a bit. Just a teensy tiny bit. And then I started thinking.

Last May I heard of another friend who makes assignment notebooks for her kids. That’s all I know about it. I kept meaning to go over to her house and take a look at what she meant by that but it never happened, so after ruminating on the idea of “individual assignment notebooks” for three months, I came up with what I think will be a pretty workable solution for us this year.

But we have only just completed day two of our homeschool year, so ask me again in five weeks, you know what I’m saying?

First off, and on the recommendation of another friend who ordered this without seeing it yet, I, too, got myself a copy of The Well Planned Day. Because I’m crazy like that.

I meant to take a picture of the cover, but I forgot, so here’s the first week of school planning I did:

I did a sketch of this, including all the Sonlight reading and specific math lessons and basics on everything else for the first ten weeks of school.

I then made four individual binders, one for each girl (two shown here):

The covers were designed on Scrapblog.

Next, I printed copies of certain pages from the My Student Planner from CurrClick for each girl:

They have one for boys too. And also a combo pack in case you are one of those strange types who have children of both genders. We don’t know anything about that.

So, from here you see that tab marked “Week 1”? I made 10 of those. Now, putting 10 weeks worth of assignments in one binder proved to be too much, so I had to break out some basic black binders for the extra 5 weeks. I marked those “_____’s Upcoming Work”.

Next, I printed off 10 copies of the days of the week, each printed individually on separate sheets of paper:

I put those in page protectors and put one set behind each of the weekly tabs. Also, behind each weekly tab is a copy of each girl’s individual assignment sheet:

With this sheet I actually penciled in the subject column and certain things on the daily boxes that I knew wouldn’t change from week to week. I made copies of that page so I wouldn’t be writing those same things over and over and over. I got this brilliant idea after I had done just that about four times. I learn the hard way.

As well as one of these sheets:

I didn’t make the specific chores permanent. I figured I wanted wiggle room to change them periodically or add to them here and there. But this way each girl has a very clear outline of what I expect them to do each and every single day.

You might have noticed the circled “T”s in certain boxes of the individual sheets. I put those there because I wanted the girls to understand they still had to do those things on that day, but the “T” is for “together” and it is something we will all do as a group. The together stuff is outlined better in my notebook, not theirs (see my planner above).

Now then, in addition to this, I went through many of their workbooks and just tore the pages out and three-hole punched them and slotted them in behind the day I wanted them to do it. For instance, behind the week 1, Tuesday section of Katie’s notebook are these pages: