Homeschool Planning: Why and How

Planning: Why and How

I would like to start a series 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. Today I'd like to explain why you should consider planning your upcoming school year, and give an overview of what that looks like.

Why Plan?

Many homeschool moms may wonder, "Why plan? If we love flexibility and independence and child led learning so much, why would we even plan out our year? Why not just dive in and see where the adventure takes us?" To that I say, go for it if you are that kind of parent and have young kids. I did some of this when the kids were in early elementary school. We would have an idea of where we wanted to start and we would see what happened. The very first year I homeschooled, Britt was a 4 year old obsessed with dinosaurs. We spent a good 4 to 5 months checking out ever book on dinosaurs that the library could get in for us, both from their other branches and interlibrary loan. I dug up coloring sheets online, and when he still wanted to learn and do more, we started our own book to detail each one he had learned about. Long after I was bored to tears with the long-dead reptiles, he was still enthralled and could name off and tell you all about 30 to 50 different dinosaurs. Eventually I noticed he was asking more and more questions about space and what it was that Grumps did (he is a computer coder who is contracted with NASA for the short answer). And that let me off the hook with dinosaurs, as we started a 4 to five month exploration of space.

The method of let's just explore together works really well, for many families at different points in their homeschooling career. It builds on the wonder of education and sticks with topics for as long as a child is interested. It's flexible, allowing a parent to buy curriculum or find hidden gems at the library. It grants the independence of breaks when needed for the ebb and flow of life. Child-led learning is the golden standard for education in my opinion, and the more we can seize on that aspect of learning the better our children's education will be.

That style of learning and teaching can work well when you have younger children or fewer children, but unfortunately in my experience there comes a time when their interest are too diverse to explore one on one at all times, or where their only interest becomes the newest video game. So how do you preserve as much of child led learning as possible while still ensuring they are getting a high quality education. After all, none of us started this because we wanted to do worse than our local school systems. In my experience most kids need some structure and planning in order to have a successful education. So how do we marry the two options particularly as our class size grows and our kids get older. How do we cultivate child led learning, when they don't seem to want to learn anything?

This is where planning comes into play. All three of my bigs detest math. Only one of them really struggles with it, another is actually stellar at it, but none of the three like math. If I left it up to them, they wouldn't learn a thing more than how to use a calculator. As their mother, I don't think that is sufficient, and so I require more of them. On the other hand all three of my bigs love history with a passion. How do we determine what to do for history in a given year, when I have three different request? Planning is the answer to both of these problems.

Planning is simple when a parent determines what goals they have for a school year, and how to implement them. Unless you are in a state (like Pennsylvania) where it is mandated, that's not to say that you have to do every subject area every year, or that you even have to cover every single subject before graduation, but you do want to have a plan. (Homeschool Tip: Everyone in every type of schooling has gaps, the key is to understand that, and ensure that they have an ability to self-educate by graduation, so that they can fill in any gaps they come across in necessary areas.) Planning lets you minimize the gaps in their overall education, while planning out a year allows you to be sure that you get to the items that you have deemed important to you in a given year.

Homeschool Tip: Everyone is every type of schooling has gaps, the key is to understand that and ensure that they have an ability to self-educate by graduation, so that they can fill in any gaps they come across in necessary areas.

In order to marry child-led learning with planning, I sit down every year and ask the kids some key questions. "What did you like this year? What seemed to work and what didn't? What do you want to do more of? What would you like to change up? Is there anything you would like to do or learn next school year?" I find this is key to a successful homeschooling year, because it means that the kids are not only involved in their education, but they are helping to take charge of it. Nothing makes a child want to learn and retain what they are learning as much as having some say so over the process. As much as possible we try to honor those request. When asked if we could never do math again a few years ago, I informed the child that wasn't an option, but I agreed that we could lesson the number of practice pages that we did in a week. And this coming year since math is taking longer for my ninth graders, I have agreed we can decrease the number of problems that we do each day. When I asked what subject they wanted to do for science last year, I got one passionate about botany, one interested in botany, and one that requested anything but botany. As a result I split science last year. With the two oldest taking botany, and the two younger students taking astronomy. This coming year the kid that went along with the choice gets to chose the topic for the pair, so the oldest two are taking biology, and the two youngest are taking earth science. They express choices and I do my best to plan the flexible parts of our year accordingly, so that the items that aren't as fun go down better.

Planning a Homeschool Year

Now, that we've established a reason to plan, you might be asking yourself where to start planning. While, I plan to tackle these areas in greater depth over this month, a great place to start is with big picture planning, for a school year. Whether you follow a traditional schedule of August or September till May or June, school year round with short breaks throughout the year, or school from January till December with various breaks built in, this step works for you. It is where you sit down as ask yourself what your goals are for the year and what all you hope to accomplish.

Goal Setting

I use to breeze through this step, but I've come to believe this is one of the two biggest aspects in having a successful homeschool year. How can you know at the end of the year if you accomplished anything, if you never had a goal to begin with. This doesn't necessarily have to be a complicated process. For my 1st grader next year, our big math goal is mastery of adding and subtracting numbers both single and double digits, as well as learning to tell time. Three main goals defined by a skill to accomplish. For my two ninth graders, our big history goal is to have a working understanding of American history from the Civil War through the late 20th century. A large goal defined by a time frame.

If you struggle with determining goals for an upcoming school year, I have used a 1990's version of "What your Child Needs to Know When." If you can find a copy at your library or a used homeschool curriculum fair, it is a good place to get general age appropriate recommendations. If not, the Core Knowledge Series offers books directed at each grade level, such as "What your Kindergarten Needs to Know" that give more detailed recommendations based in part on current standards. I prefer the first as I don't find current standards to be that spectacular, and I find the number of things suggested in the newer books to be more anxiety producing than helpful.

In both of the above cases, I need to break down the goals into workable pieces, after all you want a goal to work for you, not just some idea you have at the beginning of the school year that you don't check in with again until after the school year is complete. Trust me, I've done that in the past, and found that we didn't even approach our goals. This is also a good time to figure out what obstacles might be in your way as you work toward your goal and how you are going to implement your goal. For me, I know that I start strong every school year and then end of November school becomes sporadic until January, due to all the events of the holidays. I also know that I have a winter slump every year around middle of February where I don't feel much like the day in and day out of homeschooling, before things pick back up for us the end of March. For me I have the obstacle of staying focused at these times and so to implement my goals, I need to build in some grace periods and allow for time off during those key points of our year. I also need to set aside time each week for weekly and month check ins, as well as breaking my goals down into smaller steps for it to be a success. This is where yearly planning really kicks in.

Curriculum Planning

When I am doing my goal setting, I usually also take the time to plan the bulk of my curriculum for the year. This enables me to search for curriculum that meets my goals for the year. The kids saw a very cool chemistry and physics class at the homeschool convention, but since our goals for them this year in science includes biology not chemistry or physics we opted to save the idea for the future and not buy it this year. Additionally, when looking at biology we knew we wanted something that would earn us a lab credit for high school, so I was able to pass over courses that were just theoretical, and look for courses with detailed labs and dissections.

Again using the same examples as above. For my 1st grader I decided on Math U See Alpha, and because I expect her to breeze through the first 1/3 of the book, due to the informal math we have done the past year as a kindergartener, I suspect we'll also begin Math U See Beta. If she makes it that far, it covers all my math goals for the year. For the kids history program, we'll use 4 units from Homeschool in the Woods, but to up the level to high school we'll also add the text book America: A Narrative History. Whether you do this step as part of your goal setting or during your yearly planning, you will need to complete it before you can further break your goals down, because it's hard to determine where you want to be throughout the school year, if you don't have your curriculum choice in front of you.

Yearly Planning

This is where the rubber meets the road for me. This step is critical to our homeschool year, because if I set up our rules and boundaries up front it frees up so much mental space during the school year as well as giving us the freedom to jump on activities as they come up, because we know we have a plan for the entire school year.

Step one is to work out your school year. Florida doesn't require a set number of school days, and as homeschoolers we know that everything is educational, so really are kids are "schooling" 365 days a year. But I use to still worry that I wasn't doing enough with our time. You may not have the same stressor about doing enough, or you may have a set number of days that your state requires; however, even if you don't school for a set number of days, you will need to work out a school calendar. This is based on when you want to start and finish, how often and how long of breaks you want to take, and how much time each week you want to spend schooling.

Step two is to build your monthly schedule. This is the most critical part for me in our yearly planning and the biggest aspect of whether our school year will be a success. This is the step that really allows you to break down your goals and see where your school year is going to go. This is where I can see if those goal I'm setting are reasonable or if I need to revise them. I'll look at this more in depth next week, but this really lets me what we will cover in a year, and plan out how often we need down time or catch-up weeks in our schedule. The key to making this part of your yearly planning work is to have your yearly schedule, your curriculum, and your other plans in hand.

Weekly Planning

This final step is something I am trying out new this year, and that is to break down your monthly schedule into weekly planning, also known 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. 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. In essences it is similar to lesson planning an entire year at a time, but to allow plenty of flexibility in the schedule that it doesn't become hopelessly dated just a month or two in.

In Conclusion

Perhaps that short overview will give you some direction as you begin planning out your own homeschool year. Spend some time over this week setting goals for your students for the upcoming school year, and getting your curriculum in hand, to prepare for next Tuesday's post. 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 if you found this post on "Homeschool Planning: Why and How" helpful you'll plan to tune in to the rest of the articles in the series, the next one being on yearly planning, and a final post on weekly planning. Please 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.