Homeschool Lesson Planning: Long Term or Short Term?

I have tried a few ways to keep our homeschool lessons on track. I started out on paper, writing down what should be done in each subject on each day for the next month and I tried Homeschool Sked Track, a free online lesson planner and grade tracker that helps you plan the whole year at once and track grades. Neither worked for us at this stage in homeschooling.

Finally I combined the paper method with the organizational style of Sked Track to make my current planning program. We have been using it for seven months now and it has worked beautifully for our family and here is how you can do it.

Start by getting out all of the books you use for school. For us, this includes MFW 1st, MFW K, Right Start Math, Story of the World, etc. I also keep on hand my Planner turned to the weekly outline (Monday we do this this and this subject, etc.)

Then create a document in a word processor and enter these headings:
Week of: January 9-13 (this is at the top of the whole document)
Day: (this goes at the top of each page)
Morning: (these three go on every page)
Afternoon:
Evening:

Now you can plug in the subject names that you do each day, ours is from the weekly outline:
Morning:
-Bible
-Memory Work
-Spanish
-Housework

Afternoon:
-History
-MFW K
-MFW 1st
-Math

Evening:
-Kindermusik
-PE

Save this as a template so you only have to create it once and can copy and paste it as often as needed throughout the semester.

Long term planning is done by My Father's World and Right Start Math because we know we want to complete the entire books within a year. So I do the short term planning to determine which days of the week we will be completing lessons and working towards our goals.