Homeschool Planet Online Planner {Review}

I have been a member of the Homeschool Buyers Co-op since I first began homeschooling many years ago.  It is free to join the co-op and it gives you group pricing for homeschool curriculum and resources such as Veritas Press, Alpha Omega, Institute for Excellence in Writing, Saxon Math, Mystery of History, and so much more!  



Like any teacher, I spend my summer planning out the next year for our homeschool.  While we love the flexibility of homeschooling, it does add some challenges to detailed planning because we can change our plans spontaneously to go on a museum field trip with friends or take the day to study nature on the trails or have the dreaded sick day.  One summer I had every single lesson plan written out for the entire year.  I included which pages we would work for each day...for every subject, for the entire school year.  It took forever to do but I was proud of my masterpiece of a lesson planner.  Well, needless to say, a sick day here, a field trip there, and next thing you know none of my scheduled lessons matched up with the days on the calendar.  My beautiful lesson planner could just be thrown out the window.  Then I found THE BEST HOMESCHOOL PLANNER EVER on Homeschool Planet.


I signed up for the free 30 day trial and used that time to just play around with the program.  It is pretty self-explanatory but they also offer a set of tutorial videos to help you get started.  

There are so many great features to this online homeschool planner!  I can set up an entire year of lessons for each child and then if we decide to have a field trip or there is a sick day, I can just go into the Rescheduling Helper and it will bump all of my lessons forward for as many days as I need.  I just did this for next week when we are planning a trip to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science with some friends.  

I don't have to re-enter anything.  It is all just automatically adjusted for me.  I have our schedule in time slots but we are flexible with that because some lessons get done more quickly or take longer than expected.  Having the times designated helps us stay on track.  However, you can schedule your lessons for the day without using time slots too!  If a child gets ahead or behind in a subject, I can easily adjust the lessons with a click of a button.  It's wonderful! 

I can set up schedules for each child separately and I even have my own personal schedule too.  We do a lot of read alouds where my son, daughter, and I take turns reading aloud books that all of us can enjoy like the Bible and some of our science and history books.  I don't have to go into each of their schedules to enter that separately.  When I am entering lesson plan information, Homeschool Planet lets me designate whether it goes on Rachel's schedule, Nicholas' schedule, my schedule, or any combination of the three.  It automatically puts that lesson information where I need it to go.  That's a big time saver for homeschool families that do school work together with multiple children.

You can view your lessons plans online from multiple devices.  You can also have your lesson plans sent to your Google calendar or sent to your child's email address so they can see their schedule from their tablet.  If you like pen and paper then you can use Homeschool Planet to organize your lessons and then just print them out.  There are different formats available.  Here is a way I print it out for my kids each day so they can see what they have to do and check it off once they have completed it. 

Some other great features about Homeschool Planet is that you can attach weblinks to the lesson plans so all of the needed resources for the lesson are listed in one place.  It also allows you to enter grades for all assignments or you can enter simply pass/fail.  Homeschool Planet makes tracking easier by keeping up with hours spent on each class and can even create a transcript. Some other helpful features is the To Do Lists, Reading Lists, even receive daily scriptures to inspire you.  

A huge time saver that I love is that the Homeschool Buyers Co-op offers a Homeschool Planet Lesson Marketplace where you can purchase daily lesson plans for specific homeschool curriculums that will automatically fill in your child's schedule on Homeschool Planet for you!   These lesson plans are from well-known homeschool curriclum providers like LifePac, Rosetta Stone, BJU Press, Wordly Wise, All About Spelling, Saxon and Horizon Math, Teaching Textbooks, and even The Magic School Bus books!  And right now, if you sign up for the free trial of Homeschool Planet you will also receive ONE FREE LESSON PLAN!  But the Free Lesson plan offer is only good through 6/30/17 so hurry!


Check out Homeschool Buyers Co-op for more than just Homeschool Planet.  They also have other great curriculum as well as many freebies like a Homeschool ID card and lots of free trials especially during the summer.  You also earn SmartPoints on purchases made through the co-op which you can then use towards future co-op purchases.  For more information about the Homeschool Buyer's Co-op, please check out these online resources:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homeschoolbuyers
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hsbuyerscoop/
Pinterest: https://au.pinterest.com/homeschoolbuyer/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homeschoolbuyers/
Google+: https://plus.google.com/112069021534542740249

If you would to read some additional reviews about Homeschool Planet written by other members of the Homeschool Review Crew, please click the banner below.

Spelling Rules are DUM

Nicholas is so bright and so eager to learn. But he gets hung up when it comes to spelling.

It's hard to teach spelling. There are so many rules to learn but even when you know the rules you have to also know all of the exceptions. There really doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for some of it but we keep working at it.

I found this video clip on the Internet today. I laughed out loud as this young man makes fun of English spelling rules.

You really have to check it out. It reaffirmed to me that this is a challenging subject to teach and that you might as well just memorize the spellings of words because our spelling rules are just DUM.

Big IQ Kids Review

I haven't used any type of educational computer work with Nicholas' homeschool curriculum so far. However, we recently had the opportunity to try out BigIQKids and we are both pretty excited about it.

BigIQKids is an award-winning program for grades K-8 that is affordable and easy to use. It is an online site that offers FREE lessons in spelling, vocabulary, math, and U.S. geography lessons. Premium accounts are also available for math and geography. There is an easy chart available to help you see the difference in free vs. premium access.

I am most excited about the ability to customize lesson plans to control the difficulty and length of Nicholas' lessons. It's not just a cookie-cutter, one size fits all kind of program.

Each lesson has it's own little tutor that goes over the directions for the lesson and helps the student navigate the program.

Nicholas sits down at the table and uses my laptop for about 10-15 minutes of BigIQKids lessons each day. Some of the work is new to him like the U.S. geography program. It teaches state location, spelling, capitals, and abbreviations. Other lessons like math will be used more as a review.

As Nicholas completes a lesson, he gets rewarded with a game coin. He can then go to the game page where there are over 75 games to choose from, each costing 1-2 coins to play. There are lots of fun games like Krazy Kart, Cupcake Frenzy, Pirates Game, and Dress Up, just to name a few. Nicholas said, "The games are fun. It makes me WANT to work on school work!".

When Nicholas completes a lesson, BigIQKids sends me an email to let me know how he did. I can go online and check out his Progess Report which gives detailed information like how he scored on a particular lesson and other specifics such as average time to complete math problems for a particular lesson.

Since the lessons are customizable, it can grow with Nicholas and his skill level. There are even lessons that we can use years from now on Vocabulary Prep for the SAT which includes a spelling bee, synonyms, antonyms, and sentence completion exercises.

I can also see a benefit in having BigIQKids for Nicholas to work on so that I can grab a few minutes of one-on-one school time with my younger child.

But best of all, BigIQKids is offering a once a year bundle package right now where you can get access to all of the premium benefits offered for just $89.99/year.

For more information, please visit the BigIQKids website. You can also follow BigIQKids on Twitter.

Savor The Days was granted premium account access in order to write this review. There was no compensation for my time and the comments made here are entirely my own (and Nicholas'). Please check out what others on the TOS Homeschool Crew have to say about this great program.