When you’re a homeschooler the most wonderful time of the year isn’t in December when snow is falling, carols are being sung and children are so excited for the birth of Baby Jesus presents. The most wonderful time of the year is near the end of the summer when you get to plan for the upcoming school year and do all the organizing and scheduling and buying of new curricula.
Or is that just me?
There’s something that gets my OCD self all excited when I get to sit down with Numbers* and create the next school year’s spreadsheet. It takes hours of planning and sorting and researching and I love every minute of it. The children don’t eat for several days and the house ends up looking like a pig sty, but the money I’m saving on food and cleaning supplies those couple of days is going to go towards new textbooks and workbooks and manuals and other school paraphernalia.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for me right now. I’ve got at least five tabs open on Safari dedicated to finding the best deals on the books I want. Numbers is waiting, at the ready, for me to fill in more cells with pages to read and lessons to complete and tests to take. Sigh. I’m in nerd heaven.
Once I get everything sorted and purchased and organized and scheduled I’ll write another post listing the curricula we’re using and some of the extracurricular things we’re planning for this year. I’ll be teaching two kids, full time, this year. That excites me and scares me all at the same time.
*I used to use OneNote when I was a PC. Now I’m a Mac and the only thing I mourn about the Mac world is that it does not include OneNote. I could download that program that lets you run Windows software on a Mac but I’m worried about the safety of it all. So, if you’re a PC get yourself OneNote and go to town, whether it’s homeschool planning or researching your next big trip. Sigh…
Not So SAHM 
have you thought about getting Office for Mac and using Excel? I was never very impressed with iWork (although I only ever had a really old edition… like 2006 or something that came on my desktop when I first went mac). I had to get Office last year for a class I was taking… Haven’t used Excel, though.
I would consider it if Excel allows you to place sheets into folders. That’s the main drawback I’m facing with Numbers right now. Other than that OneNote is just far and above better. It’s more intuitive for my thought processes and you can use it more like a spiral bound notebook. It’s a better whole-idea organizer than a spreadsheet or document program. I’ve tried Evernote but it’s not as good. I’ve made Numbers work, but would consider switching to Excel if I could place all the sheets I’ve created (one for each of the 36 weeks of school plus grade sheets, attendance sheets, etc) into folders. Do you know if that’s possible?
I used homeschool tracker last year on my pc and then numbers when pc crashed. I now have excel for Mac so could try that as well…. I did love having everything scheduled for the year and knowing when we (ideally) were finishing each subject, had each test etc. I do not plan on installing it on the Mac though for same reasons you have.
currently, my home pc is working so I may enter it there again knowing it could be lost. I have a back-up hard drive now though.
My house is just recovering from the physical organizing. Now I must get the scheduling done. We are thinking of beginning school the first week of August.
I’ve looked into using Homeschool Tracker, but if I remember it only works for PCs, right? Even though it’s reinventing the wheel to some extent, I like creating my own planner because I have it exactly the way I like it. That’s what was great about OneNote. Did you guys just move? I’m out of the loop!