Plan Your Year: Homeschool Planning for Purpose and Peace

This is the book I have used to plan our entire homeschool year for the past 3 years. This updated and printed version is AMAZING! Yes, you get all the forms you need to plan your year but it's so much more than that! Pam gives you the tools to figure out what you need for your best homeschool year before you ever pick up a resource or choose a curriculum. This is the #1 resource I use before planning our homeschool year and I look forward to using it well into our middle and high school years!

Really good book, especially for starting out homeschooling! It gives a good overview of a lot of the options available & seems fairly unbiased. I wish there were more printables included. I would have given it 5 stars if the author didn't require you to go online & purchase her printable sets. The ones that are included are good but you have to try to copy them out of the book if you have more than one kid. They should have been perforated for easier use. Or the book shpuld have come with a coupon code to get them for free from her site. It offers a lot of helpful suggestions for scheduling alternatives and thinking outside of the box as far as your homeschool planning goes. If you are looking for a planner type notebook with scheduling grids, etc., this is not like that. It is more like a workbook to help you figure out how you will plan your homeschooling for the year.

One of the things I remember the most from reading 7 Habits of HIghly Effective People years ago was his idea to begin with the end in mind. As someone with a background in logistics, this approach has long appealed to me - it's one that very much helps you keep your mission in mind, whether that mission is at home or in the workplace.But it's an approach that is refreshing to find in a homeschool planning tool, and in so beginning Plan Your Year with that approach, Pam has knocked it out of the park and provided a resource that's not like anything else out there.Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of resources, guides, prompts, and tips to help you in the moment, but they're all shared in the context of supporting your end goal, whatever that looks like in terms of your children's futures (and your own, for that matter).By giving the busy homeschool mom practical, step-by-step ways to plan in alignment with her core values and end goal specifically in mind, she has handed us a tool to weed out the distractions, stay on task, and noticeably increase the peace in our homeschools.While I bought the revised version because I'm delighted to have it in an actual hard copy book, I've used her planning resources for the past few years. When I bought the planning forms, we'd had a pay glitch that left us a bit short between pay periods, and I really shouldn't have spent the money at the time. That said, the peace it brought me in making our homeschool plans made up for any tightening of our budget that we did afterwards - it was one of my wisest homeschool investments ever (both at the time and each time I've used it).

This book is fabulous. I had used the earlier version to plan our homeschool year this previous year. Having planned in this way is the only way our family was able to continue school relatively quickly after being hit (and eventually displaced) by Hurricane Michael. I did not have the mental or physical energy to plan our lessons at that point, but with Pam's system I had already made all of our various curriculums "open-and-go". I was able to pick up just a few weeks later and recreate a sense of normal for my kids.Pam guides you through the planning stages that work for whatever various curriculum resources you might utilize. Creating a vision, writing goals, gathering resources, planning lessons - it's all covered in a way that is flexible and completely customizable for your homeschool. The updated version looks great and contains new material not previous in the the older edition. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is homeschooling, no matter your style or curriculum!

So the book itself is great- helpful and encouraging and presents a unique perspective on homeschool planning that takes the pressure off and gives the reader "permission" to do things his or her own way. That being said, the book is really a workbook but is not physically designed as such. The pages should be perforated for easy access to the planning forms. And there's not enough copies so if I accidentally rip a form trying to pry it out of the book, I'm out of luck. The author does state that you can purchase a lifetime license of the forms on her website which is helpful but the price is $69!!! That's a little steep for planning forms. Granted, you get other things with that $69 but I don't want or need tutorials or a community- I just want the forms. Again, great book but the aftermarket cash grab is really disappointing. Buyer beware.

Just got my paper copy yesterday! It’s lovely... but I’ve owned the ebook and been part of the community for over a year now. Because of this system, some of which I was already doing but didn’t know it, I’ve had my best homeschool year yet. Not because the plan makes homeschooling magically easy but because it gave me peace knowing what I was going to do each day and when we went off the rails, it was farrr easier to get back on and NOT feel awful! Highly recommend!

I'm new to homeschooling this year, but not new to planning. (I'm a former wedding planner). However, when I started this journey, I was completely overwhelmed with all of the resources out there. I had no idea where to start and spent hours trying to reinvent the homeschool planning wheel. Until I came across Pam's Plan Your Year plan. This was a Godsend! Pam's plan made complete sense to me and helped me to pull everything I was doing together into a plan that WORKED!

Far exceeded my expectations, very helpful in helping you plan your way, excellent resource for a new to Homeschooling/educating parent, I wish I’d bought this book first.

My wife is loving the book and planning the school year ahead

Every homeschool family needs this book.