The Homeschool Life All-in-One Planner is a three-ring binder filled with four different sections to help manage every part of life. Kris M. Cox Educational Services created a planner that covers both family life and homeschool needs. A hard copy can be purchased for $32 or a digital one for $18.

The first section, Family Planners, contains tabs for a yearly calendar, a monthly calendar,  a weekly calendar, a to-do list tab, and tabs for important information, meal planning, and chore lists. The dated monthly calendars are printed vertically on one page. The weekly schedules are undated with five lines per day and four for Sunday. The to-do lists contain prompts for home, school, personal, and other. The important information tab has prompts for names, numbers, email addresses, health information, and emergency contact information.

Meal planning can be a chore, but this section of the planner makes it relatively easy. The weekly meal plan pages have spots for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, in addition to a weekly grocery list. Perhaps the best part is the personal note on how to use the section. It takes the idea of meal planning and makes it easy.

Like the meal plan, the chore section has an excellent how to get started note at the beginning. Sample age-appropriate chores and different charts follow this to pick from depending on the child.

The next part of the planner is Goals and Priorities. There is instruction on how to set goals, write a mission statement, and evaluate a student. It ends with a list of resources to investigate if the planner’s ideas do not work. While this section is short, it is packed full of information, and permission is given to make as many copies as needed by the purchaser.

The School Planning portion comes next. There is a basic overview of what may be needed for record-keeping and quite a few planning and recording sheets. From curriculum planning to books read to grading forms, this planner has the common documents required by most families. There is a tab for scheduling with weekly assignment sheets and a range of sample schedules followed by a blank schedule to create one’s own.  The section on finding the way a child learns best can undoubtedly help one find the best curriculum for the student.

The last portion of the planner deals with Spiritual Growth. It contains pages for taking notes on Bible reading and prayer journaling pages.

Overall, this is a comprehensive planner. I could not think of any section to add. I found the meal planning portion to be especially valuable.  Kris Cox made the daunting process of creating a long-term menu plan relatively easy. The variety of options given to customize the planner made it easy to find what worked for my family.

Of course, a planner that contains this much information is bound to be large. I found I still needed a pocket-sized calendar to record appointments and take with me. It just was not practical to lug a big binder on the road. For use at home, this planner is truly all-in-one.

Product review by Katie Seppanen, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April 2021