The Best Unit Study Planner Ever (or at least until I tweak it again)

I have the best husband a homeschooling mom could ask for. Now, before you roll eyes, keep in mind I'm writing this as a reminder for those days when I wonder why I ever walked down the aisle with him, like when he folds the towels the wrong way.

(Also, all of the kids' annoying traits are the fault of his genes. Of course!)

(Yes, I just said my kids have annoying traits. They do.)

(I'm not winning any Homeschool Mom of the Year awards, am I?)

Anyway, back to my husband and why he is so great, other than he likes to wash dishes. (He's so weird!) He designed an awesome unit study planner for me! Actually, I designed the planner, but he's the one that got on his computer, waved his magic wand, chanted a lot of latin phrases, and abracadabra! turned my ideas for a unit planner into reality.  I'm pretty sure angel tears went into the making of this planner, that's how much I love it.

One of my favorite pages is the Pinterest resource page. I find so many great education ideas on Pinterest, but then forget about them when it comes time to study that topic. It's like I never fully recovered from pregnancy brain. So I've started printing out my Pins (see this blog post for the how-to) and now I have this sheet where I can attach the ideas and actually remember them.

There's a brainstorming page for that rough draft planning stage, overview (notice my professional overview above? I take this stuff very seriously.) subtopic columns, library list, prep work you need to do,  supplies needed...6 pages total.  I had science subjects in mind when I came up with the categories, but it can easily be used with history too. I don't plan unit studies other than in those two subjects, so maybe you can use it for other subjects too. I also don't plan full-out unit studies, such as the ones that include spelling words and math, so there aren't columns for those. I do topic specific planning, like our upcoming leaves unit and leave our spelling and math to our other curriculums.

I used this planner to design our upcoming study on leaves and it did make things go more smoothly, though it can't totally compensate for my perfectionist, over-planning tendencies. I'm still waiting for some latin-phrase chanting to cure me of that one.

Click below to download the unit.

DOWNLOAD UNIT PLANNER HERE