Working Workbooks - A Student Planner

Educational eBooks with spreadsheet formulas that help with school work

#ePatterns & support for making spreadsheets to practice spelling or plan and track studies with a homework diary.

Published as eBooks consisting of simple formulas to be copied into applications such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc these practical ePatterns aim to encourage investigation of functions and formulas along with learning on how to customize them to your family’s own requirements and to develop new ideas.

It was my children's unwillingness to put pen to paper, that prompted me to create and test ePatterns so as to help them with their studies. We haven't looked back.

The idea first came to me because I was so embarrassed and annoyed at my daughter's seeming inability to complete her Student Planner, an A5 ring bound affair full of useful information provided and inspected frequently by her school. So I created an equivalent system as a multi page spreadsheet on her laptop which she was prepared to use.

This homework diary workbook lets her define a sheet for each subject being studied along with hyper links to work in progress, target submission dates, actual submission dates and her resulting grades. All of this information is summarized and displayed as RAG indicators onto one sheet, that also automatically shows her school schedule and after school clubs for the previous, current and following week.

Apart from getting work in on time, another benefit of making the Student Planner was that she has learnt and remembered far more about formulas and functions than she did in her ICT classes. Most importantly, she now has a record of and links to all the work she has produced – which was a massive bonus at revision time.

The Spelling Practice ePattern copies the "Learn, Write, Check" system used by UK primary schools to help pupils between the ages of seven to eleven, although it can be used by older children. The motivation here was to help my son practise a little on a regular basis, because as a working mum I was struggling to get enough time time to help him properly.

Now whenever we get a new word list from his teacher, I simply add it to the bottom of the previous entries, record some definitions and examples and then he can test himself by clicking on the audio links and completing the exercises while I get supper ready.

And since it was brought to my attention that most people have more interesting things to do with their evenings than read a dictionary, I have been making the word lists and recordings freely available.