Here's a planner of a different color. Okay, it's a bad pun, considering that this planner comes in six different designs. You can choose a cover with a picture of a butterfly, or a dog, or a flag, or a horse, or cute baby tigers, or a tree frog. That way, each student or journalist in our family can have a unique design. However, it's what's inside the cover that impresses me most.

The author has her priorities straight. The first pages offer an overview of her family's lifestyle of learning, culminating in a prayer for the homeschooling parent. The author then describes her family's twelve-year journey through different record-keeping systems, followed by suggestions for using the Record of Lifestyle Learning and practical examples for using the features found on the weekly pages.

We have added journaling to our homeschool this year, and I find this planner fits that plan very well. Every two-page spread - and there are enough for fifty-two weeks, an entire year - has a week of blank lines, about seven lines for each day of the week, in a section about five inches wide. In other words, there's enough room here for a brief journal entry each day. The rest of the spread is given over to boxes, about 2-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches each, eleven subject categories (Specific Training Categories) where your student can record work that's been going on all during the week. You don't just have the academic areas, such as history, science, literature, math, and art, but other areas of life related to character development: spiritual life, work ethic, and relationships. These boxes have become an important tool with which we can see, quickly, where we are out of balance. Have we done any writing this week? Did we work on artistic activities? How much Bible study did we do? Oops, it's been rainy all week, and that exercise block is looking awfully empty...

Each weekly spread features a Bible verse suitable for memorizing, relating to one of the eleven Specific Training Categories. After the weekly pages you'll find six pages where your student can list books read during the year; six more pages for listing read-alouds; four blank pages to record grades, test scores, and awards; and five blank pages for notes. The book concludes with an order form for ordering more planners or curriculum materials available from the publisher, history, art, language arts, character, and family resources.

I bought one of these books at our local curriculum fair to try it out with one child. I've been so pleased with the results I'll be ordering one for each of us, even myself!