How a Little Bit of Planning Can Save You LOADS of Time in Your Homeschool
"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail."
~ Benjamin Franklin
Oh, Mr. Franklin.
I wouldn't say a homeschool will necessarily fail due to lack of planning, but a little bit of careful forethought can also go a long way in maintaining a mama's sanity. But what does planning look like? One of the best things about homeschooling is the myriad of options on how a homeschool can be run. In fact, I would be surprised if any two families ran their homeschools in exactly the same manner. But sometimes, especially when you're a newbie homeschooler, it helps to see what others are doing so you can at least have a starting point.
During the summer, I invest time planning out our school year. I look at the "big picture," primarily when we will "do school" and when we will be taking our breaks. [Confession: I love the idea of year-long school (no summertime backslide!) in which we would have 6-week terms followed by a 1-week break. However, our Classical Conversations schedule would wreak havoc on this model, so I've yet to try it.] Many of our curricula are designed for 36-weeks of school, so I do my calculations based on this amount. I pick our end date (usually the same date that the public schools release for summer) and work backward. I haven't found a perfect system yet and do a bit of tweaking every year. For example, this year, we started school in mid-August and didn't take a spring break, so we could take off the entire month of December. Although I enjoyed having a lighter workload in December, several of our school-related classes continued to run until mid-December, including CC, my nine-year-old's online Latin class, and my four-year-old's preschool, so we weren't really off as much as I imagined we would be. [Sidenote: We do so much more school than required by law. Getting in your required number of hours is a piece of cake!] I'm still pondering how I am going to handle the "big picture" for the coming school year.
Once I have the "big picture" sketched out [I actually have it marked out on a calendar], I figure out what my children's weeks will look like. I just need to do a little math to figure out how many lessons to cover in a week! For example, First Language Lessons is comprised of 100 lessons for first grade. If I want to complete the 100 lessons, I simply divide 100 by 36 (the number of weeks we do school). 100/36 = 2.7777. That tells me that I need to teach three lessons a week in order to complete the curriculum (and we will even finish a little early)! There are some subjects that my son only tolerates for a limited amount of time (reading and spelling). For these subjects, I just set a timer each day and see how much we can get done.
For grades 1-3, I use the workbox system. I talk about it in my homeschool tour (here). To plan out what I put in my workboxes, I maintain a weekly spreadsheet, which is based off a template from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I'm not sure this is the original post to which I referred, but this is the closest one I could find. [See image below for a screenshot of this week's lesson plans.] As you can see, we start each morning with Group Time also known as Morning Time in the homeschool world) in which we do a devotion, pray, and practice our CC memory work. I have "special" events or activities typed out in the green boxes. In the column on the far left, you will see the numbers 1-10, which correspond with my first grader's workboxes. His Daily Learning Notebook and a dry erase marker are tucked in drawer #1. In drawer #2, he will find his AWANA book and bag. His Math-U-See DVD and his math sheet for the day are found in drawer #3. You get it, right?
I love this system because, once it is set up, it only takes me a couple of minutes each week to get it ready for the next week. I right-click on the tab in the spreadsheet and select MOVE OR COPY. I then tick the CREATE A COPY checkbox, and click OK. This makes a fresh tab that I can edit for the new week. I update the header with the current dates and CC week and update the lessons we're covering in math, First Language Lessons, and Writing With Ease. Then I print it out, and I know what to stock in the workboxes for the week!
I actually had to move to a different system for my fourth grader this year because our workbox system only allows for ten subjects, and this was too limiting for his schedule this year. I will share how I plan out his week in a future post.
If you are a homeschooler, how do you plan?
