Continuing with the series I began last week on planning your homeschooling year, one of the questions I have gotten the most over the years on Instagram is how I go about planning in order to have a successful homeschooling year. With 10 years under my belt and children from elementary through high school. I have learned a few key aspects to having a year that both covers most of what I want to cover in a given year, as well as ensuring the kids enjoy the process. If this week's post on yearly planning was a help to you, today's on weekly planning takes that one step further.
Weekly Planning
The final step in my homeschool planning is something I am trying out new this year, and that is to break down your monthly planning into weekly planning. This is also sometimes referred to as curriculum mapping. I first tried it from March through June of this school year and has worked well to keep us on track, so I'm planning to try it for this upcoming entire school year. Near the end of my winter slump I realized that I was going to be cutting it close with finishing everything I wanted my 8th graders to accomplish this year. In years past that wasn't a big deal because we'd just pick up where we left off the following fall, or not finish out the entire curriculum. (Homeschool Tip: I know that we never once finished an entire curriculum in public school, and we advanced to the next grade without a single thought. It is ok if you don't finish your curriculum in a given year, or if you set it aside and move on the following year without ever completing it.) However, some of their courses this year were for high school credit and some of them, such as history, I really wanted to reach a certain point so that we could begin the second half of American History at a particular point in time without a gap.
Homeschool Tip: I know that we never once finished an entire curriculum in public school, and we advanced to the next grade without a single thought. It is ok if you don't finish your curriculum in a given year, of if you set it aside and move on the following year without ever completing it.
So, I started by taking the kids' science courses and looking at how many weeks we had left until my hard stop deadline of the end of June, and then saw that their pacing so far had been 1 lesson a week. This let me know that I could schedule out a week and then give us a week off of science in order to still finish on time. I made sure to schedule the off week, the week when their writing requirements were heavier. This gave me plenty of flex time if we didn't get to part of a lesson in a given week, but surprisingly I only used the option once for the younger two. We finished up the older two's science beginning of May and the younger two's science the beginning of June. Right on schedule. I did the same with history, and by allowing a few weeks in between off for intensive writing projects or things like our co-op practice and play week, we will finish up tomorrow for my hard stop deadline.
This year I followed the same process. Knowing when I wanted to take breaks according to the yearly calendar, having the weekly schedule to tell me when we had things outside the normal routine, adding in the daily schedule and alternate schedule to help me plan what to skip verses what to keep on days we have conflicts, looking at weeks that I plan to be down weeks or catch-up weeks, allowed me to put together all the pieces to rough out this year's planning.
History is the trickiest for me to schedule out. I love history and tend to dig too deep for too long, I also build my own curriculum in part which can lead me to underestimating the time required and over planning the time I should spend on an area. For example I might have spent close to 4 months on the American Revolution this past year and used several of my college textbooks with the kids. Finally, this is in part difficult for me to schedule because the history we use is project based, and while everyone works together on the projects, the time to complete them can be variable. Of course, given all of this, I started with planning out history first this year. I knew I had a goal of completing our Civil War unit in two months. I took the list of projects for the unit and sat down and mapped out what could reasonably be accomplished in a day's lesson. We give ourselves around an hour to do history, it gives us plenty of time for the reading and projects, but most importantly for the conversations that it spurs. Even though I wasn't familiar with the projects in this unit study, I have used Homeschool in the Woods's unit studies for several years now, so I could reasonably guess which projects were shorter projects that could be done along with daily reading and activities, verses which ones needed a full 1 hour block to work on. I simply started with our first day back to school and filled in 4 days just like I would regular lesson planning. I then continued for the next 6 weeks until we have a down week. It will either be a week of no history or a week to catch up anywhere we got behind my goal in the previous 7 weeks. I skipped Labor Day and the Monday of co-op as planned using my year at a glance calendar and my alternate daily schedule. I also noted their writing assignments on the days when they matched up, under writing on the lesson plan. On week 9 I started up with our next unit study the Industrial Period through the Great Depression. I scheduled again, just as I would when I weekly lesson plan, allowing off for days we have other plans, through week 17. I then have three weeks in December of no history or catch-up from the previous unit studies. Some weeks have an extra day of no class planned built in, to allow for flexibility in completing work that week, without getting off our schedule. Because of this I anticipate, much like the last quarter of this school year, feeling less stressed about if we are completing things in a timely fashion and allowing myself to take those play dates and field trips that I've often passed on.
Other subjects are more cut and dry. Kate will work on phonics with me daily, except when we go to the library on Thursdays at her regular phonics time. In phonics like math, we'll daily just do the next lesson, so I don't need to schedule every day, only more which days we'll be working on math or phonics. DEAR time is twice a week on Monday and Thursday, but Mondays we have co-op we'll just skip DEAR time that day. There was a great deal that I could schedule this way, so that I have 40 weeks of school outlined before the year has even started.
As I did this rather than printing up a 40 week curriculum map for each subject, I adventurously placed them right on my lesson planning pages. You can do either. Most people use a curriculum map because they don't want to risk getting off track in their weekly pages and have a bunch of scribbling out and moving things if they write in pen or erasing all the time if they are using frixon pens or a pencil. If you are still unsure about when you want to take breaks during the school year, this might be the method you prefer, so that you can look to see what's the next thing for lesson planning closer to time. For history, the projects mostly don't need to be completed in any particular order so if we decide to take off a day, it's easy to move that particular project to the end of our lesson plans rather than having to bump 6 weeks worth of work by a day. There might even be some projects that at the time I may opt to exclude too. Because of that and allowing down weeks between different units I felt comfortable going ahead to write my plans down on my actually lesson planning pages. For subjects like phonics or math which will continue each day building on the day before in order to achieve mastery, you can't just move a missed lesson to the end of a unit, so for those subjects I merely went ahead and marked my check boxes to show which days we planned for those subjects without actually writing in which pages we will complete. It also helps me to gage for those other classes roughly how much wiggle room I have. Math for example is a class that we always struggle to get through. I have one student in particular who struggles more with it than others, so early in the year that child may breeze through lessons and not need a full week, but halfway through the year need two weeks or more for a lesson. By mapping out our off weeks and our set weeks I can see that Algebra will go through May 27th at one week per lesson for all 36 lessons in the book so I only have 3 flex weeks, and know there is a very real possibility that we will not complete the entire curriculum this year.
Lest you think that I have no lesson planning left to do, let me disabuse you of the notion. As mentioned, I have the days marked when we will be doing math and phonics for certain, what we will actually be doing on those days is empty since it depends on mastery of the lessons that come before, and you never know when a math lesson is going to take a few extra days or be instantly grasped and need less review time. I will need to add writing based on the kids online classes each week, to be sure we stay on top of assignments while not trying to cram everything in at the last moment. While I have science broken down into my monthly planning page, I'm unsure if the schedule is completely realistic since it will be our first time completing a science course of this depth with this level of work involved, so I will still be planning it weekly while referencing my monthly schedule to try to stay on that track. It also allows science to be my most flexible class, and making it lighter on weeks when other subjects like history or writing are more intensive. I have down weeks built in that they can take off of science or catch up if needed. Plus the schedule assumes we will all be done with science by the end of April, so we can still have May and June to work if my plans were too ambitious. Not to mention, since Fridays are going to be for exploring with our camper, we will be planning Friday outings along with regular lesson planning each week. This just helps to take the guesswork out of a few classes that aren't mastery based, but that have some variableness to completing the work.
As I reminded you on Tuesday, it's ok if you finish up before you hit your target days. If you are in a state that requires a set number of days, you are going to need to incorporate something else into your time that you feel comfortable calling educational. If you don't have a set number of days required, congratulate yourself on a year where you all covered 170 days worth of curriculum in less time, and celebrate how homeschooling gives you the freedom to work at your own pace. On the flip side, if you hit all 170 of your days before finishing your curriculum, you don't have to finish it. Or if you want, take a break and start with it the following year again. Just remember you are not a slave to your curriculum or the calendar, these are tools that should work for you.
In Conclusion
I hope this has given you some new ideas for approaching your own planning sessions this summer, and helped to order what can be a daunting task. By setting goals for my students I know what our focus should be for the next year. Then by planning out a schedule for the year, I know when we plan to pursue academics. I can then rough out how much can be covered each month in a monthly schedule, and gage how realistic my goals are. Finally I can break that monthly schedule down into weekly planning and see just where academics, other learning opportunities, and fun time fits into our week for the year. All these steps make lesson planning each Friday evening a quick check in, with minimal tweaking, and at the end of the year we can confidently say each child has "made progress commiserate with their ability" as required in our homeschool law here in Florida.
And remember if you like the photos you see, I'm an affiliate with One Stop Planners, and I'd appreciate it if you'd order through this link. While it won't cost you any extra, I will get paid a small amount. I hope you'll share your own tips and tricks for planning out a school year with the rest of us. Planning out our homeschool is a privilege and joy that truly lets us influence our child's education and create the kind of life we want as a family. It lets us control our schedule and the pace of our days in a way that other educational options don't. So, enjoy the process and create something as unique as your family.
Comments