Curriculum Review

The Printable Homeschool Planner {Review}

This year, I had the opportunity to review The Printable Homeschool Planner. Since this is my first year of honest to goodness homeschooling, I wanted to use it for a while before writing this review.

The Printable Homeschool Planner is a set of printable forms to help you keep track of your homeschool life. It includes many forms like a Science Experiment Planner and Thematic Unit Planner that would be great for unit studies or more independent projects. Purchase of the book includes 27 forms and gives you lifetime access to the members area for any new forms she makes.

Visually, the forms are very simple but pretty with plenty of white space and nice font choices. They are spacious and have ample space for writing. They are not editable at the time of my review but she is busy converting them over.

Right now, her planner pages do not really work for us. A big reason for that is that we are doing preschool and many of her forms seemed to be aimed at grade school. There are a few forms that I am using (attendance records & supply log) and adore. The greatest thing about her planner is that you can request forms! We haven’t taken advantage of this simply because it’s easier for me to corral my materials by day than to write what sounds like an exhausting plan .

Unfortunately, I have to say that there are more versatile homeschool printable planners available right now. The forms are very specific to an age range and type of schooling, which we aren’t using, at least not right now. Having a wide range of similar forms to meet many needs would be great.

On the flip side of that, she does have many forms that I haven’t seen in other printable homeschool planners, so if you are looking for something unique, this might fit the bill for you. If you want to get an idea of the types of forms and their look, you can purchase single forms to get a feel for the product. I do look forward to seeing how the Homeschool Planner expands!

Buy It!

At the present time, The Printable Homeschool Planner is $2.00 for the first 100 people who use the code 2BUCKS at checkout. Normally The Printable Homeschool Planner is $4.99.

I received a copy of this planner in exchange for a review. As always, all opinions are my own.

Instrument Zoo {Curriculum Review}

I was super excited to receive a copy of Instrument Zoo from Alfred Music Publishing this summer. I had been looking for a way to expand our musical exposure in preschool and this was the perfect tool for us.

Instrument Zoo! is a reproducible coloring book with a sound sample CD. It is divided into sections and the coloring book has an animal for most of the major orchestral instruments along with 2-3 sound samples. The sound samples themselves contain major works that feature the instrument. In addition, the sound sample CD has a PDF of the coloring pages. You can see a sample on their website.

We have been loving this! I printed out several coloring book pages at once and we’ve been doing one a week. We listen to the music clips while coloring and then switch to our composer of the month. When we finish the section we are in (still strings — we took a few weeks off), we will go to our local Marshall Music store and they will show us all the instruments that we were listening to and learning about. We also found a cool set of Musical Instrument flash cards in the Dollar Spot at Target a few months back and are using those, too.

Instrument Zoo! is $24.95 and is intended for grades K-3. I think that this is easily suitable for Tot School and Preschool. It allows the littles to participate in music appreciation with the big kids and exposes them to beautiful music and instruments. In addition, it’s very quick to do, both from a preparation standpoint AND from a teaching standpoint. You could always add to it but as easy as this is, there is no excuse from adding music appreciation if that is something you want to do.

Thank you to Brooke at Alfred Music Publishing for providing a copy of this book for review!