A Large Family Homeschool Planner With Every Child on the Same Page

Every planner on the market is built for one child.

So a family with five children is told to buy five planners and reconcile them by hand every Sunday night. Whose math is behind? Who is reading what aloud to whom? When did you last sit down alone with the nine-year-old? The answers are scattered across five books, and nobody has time to read five books.

The Large Family Command Book is one book for the whole household. The difference is structural, not cosmetic: the unit of planning here is the family, not the student.

Every child as a column

The master week spreads put every child in a column and subjects down the side. One glance shows the whole week for the whole house: who is doing what, what overlaps, and where the gaps are.

Combine what you can

The core strategy of a multi-age homeschool is deciding which subjects you teach together and which each child does alone. History, science, read-alouds, art, and Bible often combine well. Math and early reading usually do not. The combined-versus-individual planning pages make that decision explicit, so you stop teaching the same lesson three times.

If you want a method for running one lesson at several levels, the Fourfold Method does exactly that: the same four questions, with four kinds of answer (The Fourfold Method).

The page you’ll most want to skip

The one-on-one rotation tracker is the page you will most want to skip. It is also the one that catches the problem every large-family parent worries about: the quiet middle child who silently goes three weeks without your undivided attention, because nothing about them is urgent.

A simple rotation, written down, fixes it.

Built for real large-family life

Loop scheduling for the subjects that never fit into a fixed week
An independent work ladder, revisited as each child grows into more independence
Activity rotations for the little ones during lessons
An older-teaching-younger log, which is real instruction for both, and documentation for the older one
A hand-me-down tracker showing who used which curriculum and who gets it next

What’s inside

Master week spreads
Combined versus individual subject planning
Loop scheduling pages
A one-on-one rotation tracker
An independent work ladder
Activity rotations for little ones
An older-teaching-younger log
Curriculum inventory and hand-me-down tracker
Separate records sections for up to six children at different grade levels
Thirty-six weekly spreads, undated
Household rhythm, chores, attendance summary, and year review

Get the Command Book

108 printable pages, 8.5 by 11, black and white for a home printer. Undated, so you can start any week of the year. Your family license covers your household, every year.

This is a first edition, and large families know things about planning that nobody else does. Tell us what would make it better. Every purchase includes free updates to future editions.

Get The Large Family Homeschool Command Book

Gina Glenn Steffy

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Lisa Nehring

Author, Publisher, Curriculum Developer at True North Homeschool Academy

Lisa Nehring has been married for over 30 years, has five children, 2 graduate degrees and a black belt in homeschooling. She has homeschooled since 1991 and wrote a Master’s Thesis on Why Parent’s Homeschool, the Literature Review being,A History of Education in America.

Lisa Nehring and her husband, Dr. David Nehring, a Clinical Psychologist, and Biblical Scholar speak together on a wide variety of topics, including education, classical education, vision, mission, parenting, marriage, and more.

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