30 January 2015

Creating Homeschool Weekly Schedules and Timetables in Excel

With us being newly back to scheduled learning, and knowing that eventually my old version of Homeschool Tracker Plus might at any stage just take a computerised holiday, I figured it was time to make a move to something more stable before that happens.
We no longer use Homeschool Tracker Plus to set up our working schedules - I create our own customised schedules for history and English - so I didn't want to pay to upgrade to an online option, as I've only been utilising the timetable aspect for the last few years on our old version.

I happened upon a post Heather, of A Nurse's Wildfowers blog,  had shared about using Excel.
Excel is a tool I like and am familiar with; time to create our weekly timetable for 2015.
Our Customised Weekly Home Educating Schedule Created in Excel
Close up of Wednesday's Timetable
There are quite a few sites that explain how to create detailed, or generic, schedules using excel - easy to pull up with a quick engine search.
Or another choice is to select one from a site that already has weekly timetables set up as free templates in excel  (Calendarpedia also contains free templates in word and pdf).

4 comments:

Lorna said...

Thank you for sharing this! I am needing something like this to make my year look do-able!

Chelle said...

Hi Lorna!!
I need something like this too - as a plan of intent ;)
It gives me a starting point to come back to, or I can see what I can skip to fit into a shorter day.
(MOTH influenced the colour coded part :D ).
Praying for you while you think out what will work in your home.
much love to you and yours!!!

reader19 said...

It was interesting reading the blog you listed--the Nurse's Wildflower blog, and seeing her daily schedule sample. It was also very interesting to see your daily schedule too---I was just in a discussion about how many hours we 'do' lessons each day and how we tend to question whether our effort if above or below 'normal'. I wish more people posted their schedules online so it wasn't so tightly held, but I have been reprimanded for saying that aloud on a certain forum! I guess that I am one of those people that can't help but want to be sure that I am doing enough and a good enough job. I'm sure if my Dh was the teacher he wouldn't care one lick what others were doing! But, I do like to see examples of other homeschoolers--plus that gives me ideas on how to better enhance our process. Anyway, thanks for your sharing and for the link to the other hs blog! Definitely helped!

Chelle said...

Glad that helped!
Looking at Merry's daily outline might be of interest too:
http://www.hopeforhomeschool.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/organization-typical-day.html

I always find it interesting to see what others are doing.

It's to be noted that often we can get a subject area's lesson done in no time at all .... other days the time allotted is over before we are finished the lesson we are working in. I give the children the option to carry on, or pick it back up tomorrow.
Writing (English) is the only subject Jay will choose to stay and complete what he's doing. Daisy is always ready to stop :D