Homeschool Mom Favorites: My Planning & Organization Tools | Supplies That Make Life Easier

[Music] Hey everybody, welcome to the Lock Way. I'm Jessica. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing some of my favorite planning and prepping resources. Now, before I get into sharing what my favorite resources are, I want to like preface this video by saying that I'm sharing my favorite resources because I have been planning and prepping for our home school for years, but I have done zero planning or prepping for the upcoming home school year. Um, at the time of filming this video, it is like, let's see, July 20th. We start vet school September 1st. Um, and I've done nothing. I've bought two things and that's it. No supplies, no planning, zero. Because we are still soaking up summer. Like I am still very much soaking up summer and enjoying every bit of it. Like Emily's going into eighth grade. Well, that means we're at the end of middle school. High school's right around the corner. I am not trying to rush. I'm just trying to enjoy everything, which means we are soaking up every minute that summer has to offer us. But I know that a lot of you guys are probably already even planned and prepped or you're getting ready to plan or getting ready to at least prep your resources. So, I wanted to kind of share some of my favorite like tried and trueue things, the things that I turn to over and over and over when it comes to planning and prepping in our homeschool. The first thing is I can't pick it up cuz it's kind of big. Um, is HP Instant Eye. Like I know everybody swears by the Epson printers and maybe they are fantastic. I've never used one. Um, but when you live as far out as we live and the nearest store is 45 minutes to an hour away, having ink delivered to your house is like it's just so much easier. Like I don't have to think about it. The ink just shows up. I absolutely love it. So we have three printers in our home. Every one of them is an HP printer and they're all on the HP Instant Ink program. Um, so that that ink just keeps coming. Some of the things that I love about that program is that you can change like you basically pay per month based off your page count and you set that up. So, for example, Kevin's printer that he uses and Emily's printer that she uses both have a pretty low page count. I think we pay for like 100 to 200 pages a month. Um, my printer has a much larger page count, like 700, but you can change it per month. So, for example, going into next month in August, I will change all of our printers to the maximum page allowance, which I think is 1400 pages, because I know that I'm going to be printing like crazy prepping for our new home school year. And then after that's done, I'll take them all back down to a lower page count, uh, which means we pay less. And it just works. Like I said, ink just shows up. So, it's fantastic. Uh, a few of the other things that I cannot live without when it comes to planning and prepping are, um, our homeschool planners. This is, uh, two years ago. This is last year's. I basically create my own planner. Uh, I have what I use available in the Waldockway shop. There's four different kind of like themed options. They all include all of the same pages. I like something simple. Um, so in my planner, I typically have like a homeschool log, uh, where I can log what we're doing, kind of a resource log, but the page that I use the most frequently is this weekly lesson plan page, and I just kind of fill out what I would like to see us get done four days a week. I don't even say what day it is. Like, I don't say on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I'm like, "This is four days. This is what I want to get done." I also create um pages like this for whatever curriculum we're going to be using if we're going to be using a curriculum so that I could just highlight as we get ready to do the lessons. And then um that's kind of like my overview for the year. Like that's it. I don't have anything crazy. I have an overview for the year if we're doing curriculum. And other than that, I kind of plan as we go. I do keep I may not have a filled out one in here. Let's see. Um, a unit study pages. Here's actually a blank one. And this is how I plan our unit studies. So, I can put the books that we're going to be reading, the shows we're going to be watching, the games we're going to be playing, and the experiences we're going to be doing. This is probably like my favorite page because I can plan, which means I can idea dump like every idea that I have for our unit study. And then I use those check boxes off to the side to check off when we've done them. So, it becomes like planning and a to-do list kind of all in the same. Absolutely love it. It's simple, but it works. I also can never plan without our ultimate guide to learning. This has become a staple in the last I think maybe four or five years. It started out as just the skills checklist, which is basically math and language arts concepts that each grade level should master. Um, but now it is so much more. So for each grade level, there's a book list, there's a game list, there's concepts for math, there's concepts for language arts. It is probably the thing that I like base our entire home school year on because I will sit down with this. I will look at what books are listed for 8th grade, which is what we're going to be going into. What games are listed for eighth grade? What do I own? Should I add any of those? Um, so it kind of becomes like my shopping list, my suggested list, and then like I said, those concepts for language arts and math are in it. So I'll look at those and say, you know, what have we mastered? What do we need to work towards? It's just like seriously, it's the resource I wish we had had from day one. And I'm so so glad that I took the time to create it because present me thinks past me each and every year. Like seriously, I'm always like, I'm so glad I did that. I could never plan without my favorite pens, which happen to be the friction fine liners. These are erasable. They're considered erasable markers. Um, I used to love their ballpoint pens, but when they came out with these, I switched over and I I'm like obsessed. They write very similar to like the flare pens and I love that so much more than a ballpoint pen. So, this is what I use. I only needed to refill our basic colors this year, but typically I would normally buy like the 20 pack or whatever 18 pack, but we have all of those colors. These are the ones that I've used, you know, over and over and over and we needed to refresh them. Love them. And then I also really, really like to be able to highlight, like I said. So, the Zebra Mild Liners are my favorite highlighters. I don't really love fluorescent colors. I don't love big giant highlighters either. These are mild colors. They look beautiful on the page and they're just the same size as the pen so it doesn't feel like big and awkward in your hands. I just seriously like I can't live without these. I pretty much buy them each and every school year. Favorites. That is the majority of what I need for planning for the most part. Oh, except my Post-it tabs. You guys, I use these for everything. They're how I mark my planner. They're how I tab a book for how I know like this is what we're going to do next. They're my bookmarks. They're my unit study planning. I use them for everything. Sometimes I color coordinate things like okay, for example, you know, yellow is like I don't know at the moment, but I may use yellow for a certain thing or other times I just use whatever's on hand. I probably buy five or six pack of these every single year because I use them for everything. Like for school, for work, for personal. They're everywhere. Like literally, I have one of these in every single room. Okay, now that is the majority of the planning things. I do have a few prepping things that I wanted to share because they really kind of go along with planning and then prepping since that's kind of what we're doing in this season of life. Um, the first thing is my laminator. This is the Scotch laminator. I had the original Scotch laminator for probably seven years. I just bought this one, I think a year and a half to two years ago. Um, I will never own anything but a Scotch laminator. Not because there's anything wrong with any of the others, but the one lasted me so long. And you guys, I laminate a lot. So, I immediately bought another one and I love it. I will probably, this one will probably last me until we're done homeschooling, honestly. Um, my ProClick binding machine. I know this is not everybody's favorite. I've used other binding machines. This will win for me hands down always. It's simple. It's literally like a hole punch. You just put the paper in and it puts the holes in for you. The winner and the kicker for me is that the ProClick binding is almost like a three- ring binder and it opens back up. So, I can reopen these this coil, add pages, take pages out, and then close it back. And the coils have lasted me forever. Like, I bought a box of um 45 capacity, 85 capacity, and 110 capacity. That's how many pages you can put in the binding. And I've never had to buy another box because when we get done with something, I take the coil off. I use it again. Like I just bought a box of all of them. And I've never in all of these years had to buy another box. I will say because somebody's going to ask, anytime I have anything that's over 100 pages or 200 pages, because you can always print um front and back if it's 100 pages, I will bind it in sections. like I will bind, you know, part one and part two or I'll bind what we need for maybe one semester and then I'll wait until the next semester. That's what I do because I love the ability to be able to open and close the things. Emily's a perfectionist. I'm a perfectionist. It just makes our life easy knowing that like it's not finalized, right? I can open them. I can take that page out, print another one, put one in. Like it takes me seconds. Um also this Fiskers cutting machine. I love this. I get mine um they have them on Amazon, but I think I normally pick mine up from Michaels when we're there. And this is the one I bought when we first started homeschooling because I can just buy new little orange blades every time I need them. This cuts card stock. It cuts laminated card stock. There's like little grid lines on it to make it easier to line everything up. So, it is my best friend when it comes to cutting because I cannot cut a straight line to save my life. And then the last thing I have are these mesh bags. I think these are 9 by 12. um a printed laminated like a printed piece of card stock that's been laminated will still fit inside these. They are really really durable. They have a zipper closures. They come in all kinds of different colors. Um I use these to store any like loose pieces from our unit study. So any Waldockway unit study comes with a lot of games like a lot of printable games. This is normally how I store them. So, typically on my shelf, there will be, for example, the bound part of the unit study and then like all of the games will be in this and they just kind of are stored on the shelf together. It makes my life so much easier because then I know I just need two pieces. Um, and then they sit in this for as long as we need them. I don't ever really throw those game pieces away because once I've cut them and laminated them, I have zero desire to ever do it again. Um, and like I said, they come in a lot of colors. So, for example, weather and ocean are both stored in blue ones because that's what color that is. Our human body is in a red one cuz that's the color of that cover. So, it just makes it easy. Like I kind of have them somewhat colorcoordinated. So, it's like, okay, I just need these two things and we can go back to this unit again. Cuz that's something that we do frequently in our homeschool is revisit a unit, especially as Emily gets older and we can dive even deeper into it. I would absolutely love it if you would let me know down in the comments what are your favorite like must-h have can't live without planning and prepping resources when it comes to homeschooling. [Music]