Anna Vance Homeschool Planner

$42+
weekly | partially dated | religious options | up to 10 kids | sunday monthly start
8.5×11 | spiral binding | 190+ pages

The Anna Vance Homeschool Planner is a lovely planner for homeschoolers. It is a Charlotte Mason inspired planner, with several options for customization.

The unique layouts really make it different than any other planner out there. The layouts are simply designed, making this is a very thoughtful planner for intentional planning.

The planner is a full-sized planner with spiral binding and a thick laminated cover. There are over 60 cover design choices. Many have a watercolor feel while others are just solid colors or simple designs.

With each cover design choice, you also have 3 more choices. The first option is to have the title “Homeschool Planner” on the front. You can also have a Bible verse on the front. Or you can add personalized text to the cover.

Each planner comes in 4 interior style options. All have a minimal look but add small graphic accents throughout the planner.

The most basic option is called “clean” and does not include added graphics. The “In the Garden” option includes plants and little cottage designs throughout. “I’ve Gone with the Flowers” has floral bouquets as accents. And “Playful at Heart” adds accents of simple doodles and party banners to the planning pages.

There are 3 options for the setup of the Anna Vance Homeschool Planner. There is a Minimal Lesson Planner, The Simple Homeschool Planner, and the Classic Setup. The last option has the most customization ability.

Minimal Lesson Planner

The Minimal Lesson Planner is for those who only want to record their weekly lesson planning in this planner. It has 190 total pages. It is a simple planner with 4 basic sections, an Annual Overview, Map Your Years, Weekly Lesson Planning, and a Notes section.

The planner opens with a one page annual overview calendar. You are able to choose which month you’d like to start with.

The next section is called Map Your Years and is a calendar spread for planning. It is a 4 year calendar that is “condensed” into about 11 pages. Weeks of the year are numbered at the right. This section can be omitted if desired.

The Weekly Lesson Planning section is for just that, planning your lessons. There are currently seventeen layout options to choose from for these pages. Each weekly spread is two pages and is completely unlabeled.

The notes section has pages for notes. These are available in your choice of lined, dot, or grid notes pages.

This planner comes with a snap in bookmark.

The Simple Homeschool Planner

The Simple Homeschool Planner by Anna Vance has weekly lesson planning as well as monthly spreads and records pages of your choice. There are 4 main sections. Monthly spreads, weekly lesson planning spreads, records pages of your choice, and notes.

The monthly spreads come in their first monthly layout option. This is landscape format and is a two page spread. One page is the monthly calendar and the other page has a small reading list with several small unlabeled list sections. You can choose which month to start with.

The weekly lesson planning spreads are included next. You can choose to have them all in their own section or have 5 weekly spreads behind each monthly spread. There are currently seventeen layout options to choose from. Each weekly spread is two pages and is completely unlabeled.

The Simple Homeschool Planner has an optional records section. You can add your choice of up to 34 types of record keeping pages. Some of these options include:

• Calendar
• Questionnaires
• Subject by Subject
• Verses to Remember
• Lessons at a glance (several length options)
• Reading List (up to 4 sheets)
• Checklists (up to 3 sheets)
• Topic PLanner
• Timeline
• Nature Study
• Habits
• Connections
• and more!

The notes section comes in your choice of lined, dot, or grid notes pages.

This planner comes with a snap in bookmark, two sticker sheets, and two magnetic bookmarks.

The Classic Charlotte Mason Inspired Homeschool Planner

The Classic Setup of the Anna Vance Homeschool Planner has the most page options and is able to be fully customized for an extra fee.

Both the classic and fully customized versions come with a total of up to 9 sections. The Annual Overview section, monthlies, weeklies, records, and notes are all included. More sections will be discussed below. You can choose to have your weekly layouts section bound separately for an extra fee.

There are even binding options with the Classic planner! You can choose for it to come bound with a coil, punched but unbound with the coil separate, or unbound and unpunched. It comes with a snap in bookmark, stickers, and 2 magnetic bookmarks.

Classic setup

The Classic setup that is not fully personalized still has quite a bit of choices to work through.

It has all the same options as the Simple Homeschool Planner mentioned above as well as 4 more sections. Yearbook, Map Your Years, Lessons at a Glance Master, and a Pupils section. All of these sections are optional to include.

The Yearbook section of the planner is a section for memories. It includes a page called “A Year on Film” where you can write or illustrate your year in film strips. Other pages are for nature reflections, memorable passages, and reflections.

The Map Your Years section is a calendar spread for planning. It is a 4 year calendar that is “condensed” into about 11 pages. Weeks of the year are numbered at the right.

The Lessons at a glance master has three layout options. This is a place you can schedule an overview of your weeks, log your hours as you go, or make a master checklist to refer to.

The Pupils section of the planner is for record keeping and planning for each child. You can add separate pages for up to 10 children. The basic pages include an attendance calendar, evaluation questionnaire, a subject and resource list, and an objectives, achievements, and memories board.

Fully personalized

If you choose to fully personalize it, you are able to choose which parts of each above mentioned section you’d like to include. You can also choose to substitute these pages for extra notes pages, or just completely omit sections of the planner for a thinner planner.

The fully personalized version also allows you to include more pages within the pupils section of your planner. All the pages from the records section are choices.

Another section with more choices is the monthly section. You can choose between two monthly calendar layouts as well as potentially adding:

• a planning board
• monthly reading list
• meal plan
• expense log
• trip planner

Other Info

I definitely hate to pick on such a beautiful homeschool planner, but there are a few minor details that are distracting. There are a couple little misprints where one or two rows are a slightly different size than other rows in the chart.

Another design error is because they use such lightly colored pastels. Sometimes the colored boxes that are supposed to help you differentiate one row from another is hard to discern. The colors are too light and too similar.

I appreciate the grayscale and pastels. Sometimes slightly brighter colors for contrast is helpful though. And color doesn’t always distract from a minimal look that I know they are wanting with this planner.

But like I said, these are very minor details and should not keep you from happily using the planner.

Another issue I have with this planner is actually not the planner at all. The website is quite difficult to use. For one, the fonts are very small and often hard to read. Once again, going for the minimal beautiful design doesn’t have to make things difficult on the user.

The ordering process is also quite cumbersome. I can tell there has been a good amount of thought put into the site, but I do believe some site upgrades are needed to make the ordering process easier.

For instance, all the pictures of the cover options are on one page of the site. All the pictures of each of the inside pages of the planner (and there are many!) are on a separate page of the site called the planner guide. The explanations of how to use each page and why you may want it are also on that page. This all seems to make sense in itself.

The problems come when you are ordering your planner. The ordering page just has drop down lists of the name of each page or cover design. There is no explanation or picture on the ordering page. And some of these planner pages are named things like 5A or 3B making it hard to remember which you like.

So to order the planner, you seem to have two options. You either have to go through the whole guide and write down your choices on a piece of paper then order and trust that you wrote it down correctly. Or you could open both pages in a separate tab and switch between tabs while ordering.

Whichever way you end up using, it makes for a very cumbersome and honestly frustrating ordering experience. I don’t doubt many potential orders have been lost due to this.

There is another difficulty with ordering from Anna Vance. Shipping can take forever. I’m sure it depends on the time of year, but when I first ordered a planner, there was a 6 week turn around time before they would even make my planner. Then of course shipping took even longer.

At the time of writing this review, turn around time is down to 3-4 weeks, so this aspect of ordering is definitely something to consider and allow for the extra time. The turn around time is stated on the website, and in my experience, it was perfectly accurate.

The Anna Vance Paper Co. is a small business. The site says it is run by only 3 people, which explains the turn around time. It is also closed on Saturdays for Sabbath. As in, the website is down. You can’t even order or look at products.

Despite these hindrances, the company and planner seem to still have loyal users. I feel like there is opportunity for this company to grow in big ways if desired.

Anna Vance Paper Co. also has stickers, stitched journals, and other accessories like bookmarks. They offer a couple other planner varieties, including a “Pupil Companion Planner” and other basic planners, journals and keepsakes.

All items are put together by hand and packaging is quite beautiful. My planner was wrapped in paper and fastened with a wax seal and twine. There was a hand written note attached. I could tell lots of time and attention have been put into this company to make it beautiful.

To look more at this lovely planner, you can check out the Anna Vance Homeschool Planner on the Anna Vance website here.

Things we like

• Highly Customizable
• Charlotte Mason Planning option
• Very thorough planning
• Minimal version available in PDF format
• Beautiful packaging

Things we don’t like

• Shipping turn around time
• Ordering is cumbersome
• Minor typos

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