A great resource for tracking homeschool lesson plans

While we're on the subject of homeschooling, I wanted to mention a free resource that I've been using this year to help me track our lesson plans, completion dates, etc.  It's called Homeschool Skedtrack.

In the past, I wrote our daily and weekly lesson plans on a tracking sheet that I created in my computer.  The problem with the paper method is that it is rather inflexible.  For example, if my daughter didn't complete a phonics lesson on Tuesday, I had to rewrite the phonics lesson plan for the rest of the week to ensure that the missed lesson was completed.

Homeschool Skedtrack is an online lesson planner that has more flexibility than a paper planner. If we don't get to a certain subject in any day, that day's lesson will be moved to the next day or whenever we are scheduled to cover that subject again.  For example, if we cover Map Skills on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we don't do Tuesday's scheduled lesson, that lesson will automatically move to Wednesday and be on our schedule the next day.  No more erasing and re-doing lesson plans! 

Homeschool Skedtrack is easy to use once you understand how to plan lessons in sequences (rather than planning by days).  You determine how many days you will do school in a given year (which can start at any time during the year), in addition to dates you will be off for holidays, vacations, field trips, etc. 


I took my Seton and Kolbe lesson plans and wrote them sequentially in Homeschool Skedtrack.  This can be a rather overwhelming chore!  So I started by writing just a week's lesson plans.  This also gave me the opportunity to see if the program would work for us.  I'm now writing about three weeks' worth of lesson plans into Homeschool Skedtrack, which isn't too overwhelming (I can sometimes complete it while my daughter is doing her independent school work). Eventually, I hope to put a quarter's worth of work in the program.

After the plans are inputted into the program, you simply go to the "Today" tab under the Schedule and see your child's list of assignments for the day.  As your child completes each assignment, he can check them off in the online planner. At the end of the day you can approve all finished work.  Unfinished work will be rolled over to the next scheduled day for that lesson.

Here's a screen shot of the "Today" page:

Best of all, the program is free!  It is supported by user donations and a few ads on the left and right columns of the page. 

I've used the program since August and have been very happy with it. If you're looking for an online homeschool scheduler and tracker, you can check it out here