This year, I am going to be very organized with our schooling. I am going to do a full post on that evolution, but the short version is that The D, who has been recently diagnosed with ADHD, really needs more structure in order to deal with life.

Yesterday, I took all of my books that I am using this year for our core curriculum and input the assignments into Homeschool Tracker.

I have played around with Homeschool Tracker before, but I have never put a full year of assignments into it. I have to say, it was pretty awesome.

The software allows you to “copy” an assignment over a given date range. You can select which days of the week you want that assignment copied, which students it is for, and (optionally) what chapter or lesson you want to start from and what increment you want to increase by. It automatically excludes any dates you have pre-set in your calendar as holidays.

For example, if I plan to do a chapter of history every Tuesday and Thursday from September 1 through October 31, starting with chapter 3. It will automatically assign the next chapter for each Tuesday and Thursday. If one of the days is a holiday, it will skip over it.

Then I can print off an assignment list daily or weekly for each student.

I know for some, this sounds like overkill for a homeschool, but the D always wants a list of what we need to do for school work each day and now I will have it ready at my fingertips.

And I did all of this (and much more!) on the free version. It even works with Vista. (Ugh, yes, I have Vista on my laptop.)

I can’t believe it is that time already. Book It! registration is open for the 2008-2009 school year.

Book It! is a reading incentive program offered by Pizza Hut. Students are given a coupon for a free personal pan pizza every month that they meet their reading goal.

The program runs from October through March and is open to students in grades K-6.

Homeschoolers enroll here.

I just signed my guys up. They have been doing this for the past two years. This year, Little E gets to join in. He will be old enough for K in the fall!

I love all of the free homeschooling resources available on the internet.

If it wasn’t for all of those colorful homeschool catalogs I receive every year, and can’t seem to resist, I would be tempted to try homeschooling using only free web resources.

Here are a couple:

Scott Foresman offers grammar and writing handbooks for grades 1 through 6 in PDF for free.

Evan-Moor offers free lesson plans for pre-K through grade 6 and clip art, also in PDF, each month.