A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I organize my homeschool brain in my binder system, and how I store our manipulatives and supplies in our house. Here’s how I figure out what we are actually going to learn through the homeschool year, and when it’s all going to happen.
1. I figure out which curricula I’m using for the year. This year was really easy, because a lot of what we used last year worked well, so we’re continuing with most of those. But if you’re stuck on what to use, it can be really overwhelming to try to figure it out. Hopefully you kind of know what learning philosophies you lean toward. The best thing to do if you’re stuck is to search for homeschool bloggers who follow the same philosophy and see if they post about what resources they use. It might take a bit of digging, but you should be able to come up with a list of things to research more and try. (I’ll be posting our 2016-2017 Curriculum choices sometime soon)
2. I order all the necessary materials. Since we ended last school year early, we actually still have some of our history and science to get through. We did enough math to move on to the next level, and we’ll continue reading where we left off. I ordered a few things that we needed and waited for mail day. Side note: I love getting packages in the mail!
3. I take each subject and plan them out. Here’s the best homeschooling tip I’ve read in months: label things by week or number instead of by date. Because come February, I’ll feel a lot better about being on Week 15 than I will about being on December 12. You will get behind, but it will be a lot easier mentally to continue where you are than to feel like you’ll never catch up. (You won’t catch up. But it will be just fine.)
For Saxon Math, there’s a list in the front of the book that tells what is in each lesson. I type that list up, and add in which lessons have an assessment to go with them. There’s also a materials list for each lesson, so I make a note of the materials that we don’t have, and when we’ll need them. This totally saves me from last-minute shopping trips to get one random thing later on! Then I split the lessons into weeks, with 4 lessons per week. That gives us an extra day to review something if necessary, or maybe even (gasp!) get ahead.
For something like Story of the World, planning takes a bit more detail. I type up the section headings for what we’ll be reading each day. We normally do the maps and coloring pages for each chapter, and then I have to figure out which projects we might like to try as well. Since we do history only two days a week, I pick and choose what I think will work. I also make a note of which books to check out from the library for additional reading (which is important to do ahead of time, because we have to request most of them from other libraries, which takes at least 2 weeks).
4. I plan the extra days. This is something new I’m trying this year, because last year we got to days like President’s Day or Martin Luther King Day or even bigger holidays like Easter, and I felt rushed and didn’t have time to plan out extra things to do. I want to do the fun extra things, because I want to teach my kids what those days are all about, but also just because doing something different for a day can make all the difference in encouraging us to keep going.
So this year, I’m doing it ahead of time. Each day is going to get a file folder, and I’ll print out the worksheets, make note of activities and projects (and also which Pinterest board I’ve saved the directions to), and have everything ready to go, so that when we get to the week with one of those special days, I’m set. I grabbed a copy of the ebook Cheat Sheets for Holidays when it was free, and I’m hoping to read that soon to see if there’s some helpful ideas in there as well.
5. I still plan week by week during the school year. Things come up. We get sick. We have doctor appointments. We skip school to go have ice cream at the park. So what I’ve planned all nice and neat, week by week, for the whole year, won’t really work out that way. Each Sunday, I sit down and add the lessons to my plan for the week. I look for additional activities for our Letter of the Week, or a review of a math concept, or a different project for our history lesson because the one I wrote down requires three things we forgot to buy.
We’re all different. How do you plan your homeschool year? I’d love to hear about it!
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