Planning your homeschool year can seem like hard work… but it doesn’t have to be! The key to planning a successful homeschool year is keeping it simple. And let’s be honest – there’s more than one way to do something! Today we are going to talk about 5 different ways to plan your homeschool year.
1. Curriculum Planning
While it’s important to have goals, don’t overdo it on the “strictness” of your homeschool. In my experience, when we become too focused on meeting certain standards, it’s easy to become a standard-Nazi! Nobody wants that – it only leads to pain and frustration for everyone involved. Relationships have the potential to be ruined and even mommy is gonna be ready to give up after a few weeks of that nonsense! Trust me- I’ve been there!
BUT… if keeping your children “on track” is super important to you, usually there is a recommended time schedule for each curriculum choice you make. If not, you can easily come up with a makeshift timetable by deciding how much your child should cover and dividing that by how many weeks you want your child to do school that year. From there, you’ll know approximately how much should be being done each week in that subject, and can divide it up throughout the week however you please!
Make sure there is TONS of cushion and room for error. There will be times that you may need to spend extra time on a subject and there may be times you can skip straight through a topic because it’s so easy! Try to go with the flow as much as possible to avoid unnecessary friction. Even school teachers take more time with entire classrooms when necessary, even if it’s at the expense of not completing everything they wanted to that year! Homeschooling is supposed to be even MORE adjusted to your child’s needs, not LESS. Take the extra time when it’s needed… without feeling guilty! After all, how often do you remember finishing an entire school book growing up?
2. Planning Unit Studies
When allowing your child to choose the topic, unit studies and unschooling come to mind as viable options. Unit studies are a great way to keep your homeschool fresh and interesting. A unit study is basically where you pick ONE topic and create an entire course of study out of it by finding a way to incorporate every subject into the main topic.
One example would be a topic like “Egypt.” You might teach your elementary student about pyramids for math, the story of Moses in Exodus for Bible, reading about what it might be like to be an Egyptian Slave for Literature, write a story about what it would have been like to be an Egyptian Pharaoh for Creative Writing, etc, etc. The idea is that you find a way to totally immerse your child into one topic through every subject for a specific time frame, usually anywhere from a week to a month.
Planning a Unit Study can be a lot of fun and can be very rewarding. Many people who use unit studies to teach in their homeschool use ready-made unit studies (like those from Gather Round or from these free unit study options).
Others DIY their own unit study (check out this free unit study planner I found!). To plan your own unit study can be easier than you think. Choose a theme, decide what your educational goals are for that theme, and go out and find things to do to help reach those educational goals. Think books, crafts, field trips and projects! I’ve heard many moms rave about using Trello to plan their unit studies.
3. Unschooling Planning
For unschooling, you can choose ahead of time what types of things you would like your child to do. Would you expect them to complete a project or presentation of some type each week? Are there specific questions you would like your child to answer? What are some specific generalized questions that could work for nearly any topic that you could give your child as a guideline to help facilitate their schoolwork?
Planning for unschooling would mostly be coming up with a plan of how you would like your week to go. How many field trips are we going to take and on which days? How many hours are we going to devote to research, projects, and activities outside of the home? How am I going to encourage my child to incorporate math, language arts and other possible subjects into their planning?
Because unschoolers typically try to allow their children lead in their education, planning for unschooling would be more like choosing a routine on when school times are going to take place and what will be at home vs what will be out of the home, planning field trips, etc.
4. Reverse Planning
Speaking of unschooling, not everyone plans their homeschool day ahead of time… and that’s perfectly acceptable, too! Instead of planning your homeschool day ahead of time, there are many people who simply make a record of what they ended up accomplishing each day.
Everything we do in our everyday home life can be categorized under a topic for school work. Make a list of all the educational activities you accomplished that day, including any cooking, cleaning and other “home economics” learning, and place them into categories of which educational topic they would fall under.
Did we learn about the location of grandma’s house in relation to our own house? That could be geography. Did we bake the neighbor cookies for her birthday? That could be home economics, math, and citizenship. Did we go swimming at the local gym, or attend a karate, ballet or dance class? That could be physical education/P.E./Health. Do your children take piano lessons? That’s music.
With reverse-style planning, the idea is that instead of planning out each day ahead of time, you kind of go with the flow of each day, reflect on, and record the activities you DID complete throughout your day.
Side Note: The Seesaw App
The Seesaw App is one free app that is perfect for reverse-style planning. I mean, it’s great for other planning, too… but I truly believe it would work best for reverse planning! We just came across Seesaw a week or two ago and have been experimenting and I’ve been pleasantly surprised!
The Seesaw App is an app that works much like a digital portfolio to help you keep track of all of the things you did in a day. You can upload pictures & videos or you can even create your own pictures and videos right there when you click the “+” button to upload a new thing! You can create new drawings, add text to your pictures and videos, add a multiple picture collage of an event you’re documenting, add a note, or add a link.
You can take pictures and upload things yourself with the Seesaw Class version of the Seesaw App, and if you would like, your children can upload and document their own videos, pictures, too by downloading Seesaw Family (the “student” version) onto their own devices. I’ve had my children uploading videos of oral book reports of recent books finished, taking pictures of their artwork and crafts, taking videos of them playing the new songs they learned on their instruments and all kinds of fun things!
My kids and I have had a lot of fun playing around with this the last couple of weeks and I really enjoy having a place to record pictures of their work digitally… so I can just throw it all away. What can I say? The clutter is real!
One of the best parts about this digital portfolio app is that you can add folders to represent each subject to easily categorize each uploaded item (we named the folders according to school subjects like math, english, home ec, and physical education). You also choose which students participated in that activity when you upload each new item. So at the end of the year, especially for those who need to put together portfolios, you can find the information you need according to subject or which child super easily!
Because you are able to just take a snapshot of each activity accomplished – and because each of your children can have access to the app on their own devices, making it easier for you, mama – the Seesaw App is the perfect way to easily and accurately document all of your children’s homeschool progress throughout the year… no sweat!
5. “Open & Go” Planning
While the term “Open and Go” typically is used to describe a curriculum that enables you to just open the book and continue on in your lessons, I would like to introduce the idea that “Open and Go” certainly counts as a way of planning your homeschool year, also. This is my favorite way to plan the homeschool year because it’s kind of like not planning at all.
Instead of trying to say that “xyz” has to be accomplished today, which has the potential to really drag out your school day, this style of planning sets a time frame up in advance. A slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach to learning allows there to be constant progression without the stress of feeling like you have to hit certain milestones within certain timeframes. Instead of focusing on milestones and timelines, you can move forward at each child’s own pace, whether it be fast or slow, and just continually move forward.
Planning in this fashion takes the stress out of planning because you aren’t really planning at all! You’re just moving forward each and every day toward the goal of one day finishing until one day it will all be accomplished. This type of planning makes for a happier, less stressed mama as well as happier, less-stressed children. Having everyone less stressed certainly helps with maintaining the overall joy of homeschooling in your home, too, which is always a plus!
Homeschooling in this way works best with literature-based learning, and of course open-and-go style curriculum choices.
What Do We Do?
I, personally, do a mixture of all of these things. For History, my children read a chapter in their literature-based History book and are expected to completely plan any type of project or presentation of their own choosing by Friday (unschooling planning…ish).
For Math, English, and Science lessons we set a timer and move forward, each child at their own pace (open and go planning). When we do new things, impromptu and in the moment, I take pictures and upload it to Seesaw later, labelled in the category it would fit (reverse planning)!
When we need a break or need to dive deeper into a topic, we put everything on pause and do a unit study. We might spend a few days, a week or even a month on a topic, depending on what I believe is necessary! This is unit study planning.
For Reading and Bible, we follow the recommendations per the curriculum because it’s already nicely laid out for us (and it works well for us to do it this way).
For tips on setting a routine for your homeschool, check out our post How to Set a Fantastic Home Routine!
How do you do your homeschool planning?
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