Printable Homeschool Clipboard Brain Dump Dashboard

I never did like the term brain dump but the concept? All about it. This is a space for my thoughts to overflow and to help me lay things out in our homeschool day. This way they are no longer floating in my head and taking up valuable real estate.

Generally, this sets the stage for a quick clarity session. Once the full lesson plan is fleshed out it gets broken down onto the dashboard for the week. I take a few minutes to inventory pending thoughts and ideas and can refer back to this as the week progresses. We love a good checklist and this one can just sit at the top of the clipboard all week as we homeschool.

dashboard organization

The sections are pretty self explanatory but I will briefly go over each here just because. Maybe you’re in no mood to squint at these pictures today.

• This Week 🪧 I purposely didn’t fill in the boxes here with labels so that I could leave it open for different uses. Maybe you only homeschool three days a week and want those delineated differently. Or perhaps you didn’t want to even use the boxes for daily anything but instead just a list of things you were grateful for that week. There’s seven boxes, do what you please with them. You’ll see a few of my own uses later on.
• Observations 👀 I like to take notes on my (and my kiddos) thoughts, feelings, and things I am noticing in this section. It may be that so-and-so is holding the pencil a certain way this week or learning something new about their personality. If there’s something I want to remember later when creating new lesson plans—or eventually our end of the year portfolio—this is where it ends up.
• Self Care 📓 I am still practicing remembering to care for myself now that I have kids. Not sure what about giving birth just made me unaware of my own needs but here we are. Anyway, I use this as my little reminder space. It reminds me to journal or that I am in the middle of an audio book. I’ve found this to be a great place to get this reminder—to keep me from feeling like I’m sinking in my homeschool day.
• Admin 📋 I plopped this here for random lists and tasks I need to do. As they cross my mind I jot them down so that I can take the proper steps at a time when I am not in the middle of educating my children.
• Current Overarching Objectives ⚖️ This is the bigger goal we are working on in that unit.
• Week 🗓️ I usually list the week number here because that’s how I’ve set up my Notion Lesson Planner but you can also just fill it in with the current dates of the week.

three ways to utilize this dashboard

I don’t use this dashboard every week but I have used it fairly often. I think what’s made it so functional for me is all of the blank space. I can use it for full paragraphs of notes or add bullet point lists, or just stamp a space to make it look pretty.

There are seven boxes to fill in at the very top but they are purposely not labeled. Here’s a few ways I have found this to be useful.

• One box per every day of the week. Start your week on whichever day the most sense for your mind.
• Five boxes for just the weekdays and use the remaining two for lists, photos, ideas, etc.
• Some weeks I have lots of lessons I want to introduce, but don’t exactly schedule each of these. I use each box for a lesson and make it into a sort of horizontal check list. As long as the activity or lesson is done, I don’t much care when in the week it gets completed.

print it out

Old school. You know I love a great pen and a smooth piece of paper—and don’t let me get a moment to do some stamping! If I am in a week with a quicker pace I tend to just print this out. They end up in our homeschool binder at the end of the week and give me a snapshot of what went on. Helps me jog my memory.

digital planner

I usually use this dashboard on my clipboard but you can also just pop it into GoodNotes.

Much like re-printing a fresh page, you can usually use the original dashboard as a template each time you need a new one. There are many note-taking apps but I personally use GoodNotes for my digital planning. They have a cute little page icon with a plus sign on it on the right side of the toolbar. Clicking that will bring a little pop-up in which you can select Current Template, and whether you want to add this before or after the current page you’re on. Easy peasy.

The added bonus of this is that you can go write in and cover up the original headers all-together if you need to. I obviously made this dashboard for myself but maybe you’d prefer it say Groceries or one of your children’s names instead of having an Admin portion. You could easily recolor this or just pop larger text over that header.

I think this option is great for those of you who like to plan this way, of course, because each page is saved right along the next. In the end you’ll end up with a full document for the whole school year that will give you an at-a-glance view of what went on in your homeschool week after week.

wipe it clean

I think my favorite idea for this dashboard (and the original product I was looking for) was to have a dry erase dashboard. I really wanted something I could fill in each week and then just wipe it clean and re-use.

You can print the dashboard on thicker cardstock and then slide it into a sleeve like this. If you already have a laminator bust that puppy out for this. I’ve always found mine pretty easy to wipe clean, but these are the sheets we use.

how to get one for your homeschool

To download your free Printable Homeschool Clipboard Brain Dump Dashboard pop your info in down below. Once you’ve downloaded the dashboard you can either open it into a note-taking app like GoodNotes or just print it on out. If you’re looking for a more intensive expansion on the dashboard, check out the Notion Homeschool Dashboard to see exactly how I keep our documents, lesson plans, attendance, etc. all organized in one space.

Related Post: Homeschooling Get-Started Checklist

Related Post: Notion Homeschool Dashboard