With the New Year, I realized that we needed to change our system for keeping the family calendar. With me in graduate school, an active volunteering life, 2 kids homeschooling, and the other in a final year of free range preschool, the system I had been happily using (paper planner/bullet journal) was about to break down. The main issue was that I needed to enter a lot of repeated events (karate practice, zoom classes, etc), and the time it would take to enter everyone's activity into a paper calendar was not feasible. Not to mention the fact that the data would not be portable or easily transferrable to anyone else.
I first tried Homeschool Planet (yet again). This is the third time I have tried it, and I do not like it. I also do not understand why it looks the same as it did several years ago. I find it complicated and clunky, and every time I access it, it is more dated.
I then decided that everything I need to do (since I do not track grades), I could do in Cozi, which I had used years ago. I put everyone's scheduled activities into it. I also put in all chores and assignments as all day events. All of us have the app on our phone. Each boy's individual agenda is also printed, and I put them on the refrigerator with magnet clips.
Here is what I like about this system:
- My husband and I and each boy can be clear on our expectations, eliminating a lot of the fuzziness that was so bothersome to Bug.
- I can punch holes in the agendas when the week is over, and I actually have a record of what they did! I can also jot things down (documentaries they
watched, etc) that were not assigned. This is good protection for me in the extremely unlikely scenario that we would be accused of educational neglect. Of course, in that scenario, I am also pretty sure that 5 minutes of a social worker chatting with my kids about any academic subject would do the trick as well. - We can all access the calendar from our phones.
- I can use the reminder function.
- It's easy to input events, to make them repeat, and to change them.
What I don't like:
- I feel like the to-do function could be improved. I would like to input their chores and repeating assignments as to-do items rather than all-day events.
- There is so much on the calendar that the monthly view isn't usable.
- I liked my simple, low-tech paper system. It was calming. But 5 people with irregular schedules is too much for me to keep up with using a low tech system.
