I've had some interest in how I'm planning our homeschool year and thought I'd write a post to break down what I'm doing. It's important to note that each state has its own rules and requirements for homeschool families so check with your state. Utah - where we live - suggests doing school 180 days but I don't have to turn in or record any type of attendance. Many curricula are organized with 180 days or 36 weeks of school in mind so it just makes it easier to plan with those numbers in mind.
Curriculum
The first big decision is choosing what method of homeschool you will follow and what books you plan to use. We are more school at home in our approach and this year we are using BJU Press for all the major subjects, Sing Song Latin for language, and I'm writing/planning art, music, and Bible on my own. If you aren't familiar with the different methods to homeschool, this website will break down the most common ones. Keep in mind you don't have to follow any one of these completely. While we are structured in the curriculum we use we don't have a set schedule of how much time is spent on each subject, the time we do certain subjects, etc. Once you have your books in hand, you are ready for the next step. The actual planning.
Yearly Planning
Once you know what books you're using and how many days/weeks your state requires, you can decide how your year will look. Some homeschoolers prefer a year round approach. This gives mom a few weeks off throughout the year to regroup and rest. It often looks like 9 weeks doing school {one term}, three weeks off, and repeat. So instead of having a long summer you have breaks at nine week intervals all year and just three to four weeks off in the summer. I've never tried this because I enjoy having a long summer break and my kids definitely do! We start in mid August and go through mid April with short breaks at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We also finish school daily by noon so that gives us every afternoon to go places and do things.
I print off a calendar from this website because you can choose your beginning and ending months and what format you want. I mark off the holidays/breaks we plan to take and circle the date we plan to start. Then I count out 36 weeks, taking into account any days or weeks I blocked out for holidays. That gives me my end date. You can add or subtract days if you don't take full week breaks. And we're ready to move on to the last step!
Daily Page Planning
Because I am a planner, I like having guidelines for where we should be as the year goes on. I also think it's good for children to see a goal {in this case a certain page number} and work toward it. I make a simple chart that lists all the subjects, the number of pages or chapters each has, and my start and end dates. Some subjects like spelling and Latin are easy. We do one lesson a week in each. For the other subjects I take the total number of pages in the book, divide by 180 {the days we do school}, and it tells me how many pages we should do a day to be finished in 180 days. If the number isn't even - like 2.6 - I make a note to do 2-3 pages a day.
We break our year into four nine-week terms. So I also take the total number of pages, divide by two, and that's the page number we should be on halfway through the year. I split it in half again for the first term and add that number to the halfway point for the third. Is that confusing? Here's an example:
Our math book has 332 pages. 332 divided by 180 equals 1.84 {about 2 pages a day}. **You can be finished at this point because you know how many pages to do each day. But if you want to give yourself or your student a number to help keep on track throughout the year, keep going!** Now we take 332 divided by 2 and get 166. We should be on page 166 by the end of our second term. Divide 166 by 2 and we have 83 so we should be on page 83 by the end of our first term. Now take 166 and add 83 and we get 249 which is the page we should be on by the end of our third term.
In our art and music schedule I purposely left the last two weeks of school free. This gives us extra time those last two weeks to finish up the other subjects if we get behind for some reason. Also her spelling only has 33 lessons so we will finish that three weeks early.
I know this seems like a lot, especially when you have multiple kids. But once you get into a groove it goes very quickly. It took me a few afternoons but that was doing it with a baby in my arms between nap times. I should note that I only do this with my second grader. For my preschooler I'm very relaxed. He'll do art, music, and Bible with us. Then he has his own book and we'll focus on a certain page each day but I'm not going to be super scheduled with him because at his age a lot of learning is just playing and observing new things.
If you are a seasoned homeschool mom, do you schedule out your year like this? Have you found any tips or tricks to make prepping easy? I'd love to hear about it!
Photo by Melinda Gimpel on Unsplash