Planners and schedules are a hit or miss for me. I try to use them faithfully but always fall off the bandwagon. I do tend to write things down a lot and that has been my preferred way to track what I need to do. The problem with that, for me, is organization. I have notes everywhere to include planners and am constantly reminding my two girls to complete their work or inquiring if they did complete their work. This is why I was interested in reviewing the Annual Membership Plan by My School Year Homeschool Record Keeping. It's a planner and a calendar all in one.
First, I'll discuss these two features. The Calendar provides a resource to track and handle appointments, errands, extra curricular activities and much more. It's also versatile in that the user can change the layout as well as color code each child's schedule. Another bonus is it can be exported and printed and is mobile. The user can even sign up for daily or weekly updates that are automatically sent to either the user's e-mail or the student's or even both. Here is an example screen shot of the calendar for today:
The Planbook is where the classes and details are added for each student. Once classes are added, assignments are then added. The versatility is a key to the entire program in that one can choose all the specific details for each lesson allowing the very basic information to more detailed to include dates, times and more.
Below provides a look of the lessons that I entered for one of my students. From this screen, I can edit one or all, mark done and grade.
There are many features within every functionality of the lessons. Once a lesson has been entered for the student, the user can enter a preset date to be completed by and the amount of time that it took to complete are both optional. Grade options are very versatile and do not constraint the user from providing a canned approach to each lesson and/or student. For example, types include assignment to experiment to not graded and much more.
There is always a cancel feature so the user functionality is really nice if you want to spend time exploring or if a mistake was made.
Within the Planbook, there are options to change the course, school days, class time, grading settings and more. It's easy to add new courses as update current ones assigned.
Another feature I like is what is called Create-A-Plan. This has four options:
- Quick Split which will divide the material into evenly distributed lessons. This is good for books which is why I used it for her reading assignment.
- Quick Split Advanced is for more complex assignments with naming patterns.
- Rapid Repeat is for pre-selected lessons such as household chores or other repeating tasks.
- Rapid Repeat Advanced provides more flexibility with the steps or increments.
For my example on the Quick Split, I'm going to utilize her reading assignments. I can set the start date of the term or utilize "today." What is also nice is you can share the details across students thus saving time in having to keep re-entering information.
After completing the specifics, the lessons are generated for the student.
There are many other great features with drop down menus for each student allowing quick access to topics such as Attendance, Awards, Standardized Tests and much more.
The next features include the Homeroom and Reports. Homeroom provides the user a quick look as to each student's progress. This view is only a sampling of the page that is shown but provides a great look at to the complexity of what is provided. It's sort of the one stop shop for looking at where your child is with their lessons and the term they are in.
Reports are a really nice feature since it allows the user to create lesson plans, course descriptions, transcripts, report cards and more. Here is an example of a transcript which to me, looks really professional:
The Teacher's Aid Homework Helper provides all the assistance needed to get started and continue with the tools to aid in success. It also provides alerts to bring items that need attention to the user as well as the ability to see when assignments are completed.
Other key features to note:
- 100% mobile friendly - also uses QR codes
- Generate lessons on iPads
- Generate and download transcripts on phones
- Creation of unlimited students
Check out what others on the Homeschool Review Crew, a division of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, thought by clicking on the (photo) link below:
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