The case for undated is simple. A dated planner assumes you start in August, finish in May, and lose no weeks in between. Almost nobody does, and writing over printed dates for seven months is demoralizing in a way that is hard to justify for the convenience of not writing dates in.
An undated pack solves that and creates a different problem: you have to decide what to print and how much. Here is the full page inventory, with quantities.
The page inventory
| Page | Why that many | |
|---|---|---|
| Year on two pages | 1 | Term dates, holidays, testing, co-op |
| Month on two pages | 12 | Undated grids — you write the numbers |
| Weekly spread | 40 | 36 school weeks plus 4 spare. This is the bulk of the pack. |
| Daily page | 0–20 | Only if you actually plan by day. Most people print these and never use them. |
| Subject planning, per child | 8 each | One per subject per term |
| Progress log, per child | 4 each | Lesson numbers and dates |
| Attendance | 1 | 40 rows fits a year |
| Hours log | 1 | Only if your state counts hours |
| Subject coverage grid | 1 | Subjects down, months across |
| Reading log, per child | 2 each | 40 lines per page |
| Field trips and activities | 2 | Date, place, what was covered |
| Book and curriculum wishlist | 2 | |
| Term review, per child | 3 each | One per term |
| Notes and observations, per child | 4 each | Freeform. Print more than you think. |
| Blank lined | 10 | Always |
For two children that is roughly 110 sheets, or 55 double-sided. Budget an hour of printing and about $8 to $12 in paper and ink.
The two pages people over-print
Daily pages. Almost everyone prints 180 of these in August and uses eleven. Print none the first term. If by November you genuinely wish you had them, print twenty then.
Subject planning pages. One per subject per term is right. One per subject per week is a planning system you will abandon in October, and it doubles the pack.
The one page most packs leave out
An observations page per child. Not planning, not records — a blank page where you write what you noticed.
"Reads well aloud, freezes when asked to write." "Better at math before 10am, unusable after lunch." "Asked three questions about the Romans unprompted."
In three years this is the page you will reread. It is also the page that tells you what to change in August, far more usefully than any test score. Print four per child and use a whole line per note.
Print settings that stop pages misaligning
Four settings, and getting them wrong is the most common reason a printed pack does not punch straight.
Scale: 100 percent, or "actual size." Not "fit to page." Fit-to-page shrinks every sheet slightly and by different amounts, and your punch holes will not line up.
Paper size: match the file. A Letter file printed on A4 or the reverse rescales. Check which the pack was designed for.
Double-sided: flip on the long edge for portrait pages. Short-edge flip prints every second page upside down, which you will not notice until page forty.
Print one test page first. Always. Measure it against a page you already have in the planner. Ninety seconds, and it saves reprinting a hundred sheets.
Paper
| Weight | Suits |
|---|---|
| 75–80 gsm (standard copy) | Cheapest. Fine for one year, ghosting on the reverse with gel pens. |
| 90–100 gsm | The right choice. Minimal show-through, survives a year of handling. |
| 120 gsm+ | Dividers and covers only. Too thick for 100 pages. |
The upgrade from 80 to 100 gsm costs a few dollars across a whole pack and is the difference between a planner that looks tired in February and one that does not.
Assembly, in order
- Print the test page. Check the scale.
- Print in sections, not all at once, so a jam does not ruin an uncut batch.
- Punch in small stacks. Five or six sheets at a time punches straighter than fifteen, whatever the punch claims.
- Assemble in section order: year, months, weekly spreads, records, then per-child sections, then blanks. The order is in the multi-child planner build.
- Add tabs. One per section. With this many sections it is not optional — see binder tabs and dividers.
- Add a pocket at the back for co-op forms and permission slips. Pocket dividers punch straight in.
- Size the discs or rings generously. 110 sheets plus tabs is a thick book, and it gets thicker as pages fill. Undersized discs pop out by October.
Two things to do before you print
Rule one weekly spread by hand and use it for a week. You will discover the column widths are wrong for your actual children, and finding that out before printing forty copies is worth the week.
Count your sections and your children. The quantities in the table above are per child for anything marked "each." A four-child household prints roughly twice what a two-child household does, and the weekly spreads stay at forty either way.
Undated does not mean unplanned
The one discipline an undated pack needs: write the dates in as you go, at the start of each week, not in advance. Filling in the whole year’s dates in August recreates the dated-planner problem you were avoiding.
Write the week’s dates on Sunday as part of the thirty-minute planning session — the routine is here — and the planner stays honest about where you actually are.
Start with forty weekly spreads
If you print nothing else, print the weekly spreads and the attendance page. Those two cover the planning and most of the record-keeping, and everything else can be added a section at a time as you find you want it.
The record pages are ruled out in full in homeschool record-keeping printables, if you would rather rule them than print them.