As a homeschool mom, I am always looking for ways to keep me organized. I want something that allows me to keep the house livable and my sanity in check at the same time. I was given a chance to review The Organized Homeschool Life and found a great way to start seeing a balance between what I need to do on a daily basis.

The items I received for my review included The Organized Homeschool Life: A Week-By-Week Guide to Homeschool Sanity book, The Organized Homeschool Life Planner January – June, and The Organized Homeschool Life Planner July – December. You can use the book without the planners, but you need the book to use the planners. They all work together very well to make your homeschool day more organized.

First, I want to talk about the book. This book has a weekly challenge for you to complete each week to bring more organization to your daily life. Dr. Melanie Wilson has taken tips from The FlyLady and made them work for our busy days. Each of the days are small, short assignments that are easy to accomplish, even when homeschooling four kids!

The challenges range from Daily Devotions, cleaning, homeschooling and holidays. Every aspect of your daily life can be touched if you use this book for a full year. One of the first things I read was that not every challenge needs to be completed, and that even the author hasn’t completed them all in one go around. This book is a great resource to use year after year to keep things running smoothly in your house every year.

I have skipped the vacation challenge, due to my husband’s health, vacations are not in our future for this summer. However, I was able to go back and do the Daily Devotion Challenge that I had missed at the beginning of the year. This book was flexible enough to allow me to do that.

The planners I received, go along great with the book. There is a monthly calendar that is undated, so you are able to put the dates in during the year you are using it. After the calendar, each month is separated into the different weeks. At the beginning of the week, you have a checklist of that week’s challenges. This is where you need the book to make the planner work. You won’t receive all the details of the challenge, just the checklist for each week.

Not only do you have the challenges to work on each week, but you also have your weekly goals, tasks and the potential obstacles that will hinder you from completing your goals and tasks. You also have a spot to work on your meal plan and shopping list for the week. For our house, this is big. I have recently found out that planning the meals for the week helps me stay on budget for each week.

Once you get past the weekly overlook, you have planning pages for each day of the upcoming week. These pages give you space to spend time with God, pick your priorities for the day, planning your different focuses for the day, and three different sections for planning what to do during the morning, noon, and night for that day. None of these days has anything about homeschooling on them, rather they are meant for the other aspects of your day.

Having a planner that was not a homeschool planner was something new for me. I really liked having a separate planner that allows me to focus on something other than homeschooling. This allowed me to focus on the other aspects of being home all day other than just homeschooling. This was huge for me. While I had to have two planners, this one for the organization and a second for homeschooling, I found that it worked. I was able to separate the two aspects of my day and spend time on each one instead of trying to combine them and get stressed when it wasn’t working.

If you are looking for a way to keep your home organized, this planner and book are a great way to do just that!

—Product review by Amanda Hopkins, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, June, 2018