Along with changing our homeschooling method this year, I’ve also had to change how I plan our homeschooling journey. I’m admittedly an over the top, OCD planner and have always outlined and planned our entire homeschool year before we began.
Since becoming a child led homeschool, this planning method no longer works for us. For me, this year has been full of out with the old and in with the new! It’s a good thing that I have been learning to view changes as wonderful possibilities and embrace them!
Since moving to a weekly homeschool planning schedule I’ve found that it is more freeing than I thought it would be. So, I wanted to share a few tips for those of you that have thought about or are interested in weekly homeschool planning.
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Set up your homeschool hours.
You don’t have to stick to them like glue, but you need to have an outline for your learning time.
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Assign topics/subjects to your homeschooling time slots.
Kids thrive on consistency and schedules, so when they know what each day holds they’ll be more likely to complete each homeschool day well.
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Print all of your necessary lesson plans and subject resources ahead of time.
Don’t wait until the day you need something to print it. Print everything you’ll need for the week ahead of time, I tend to do my planning on Sunday afternoon/evening to ensure my mind is fresh and ready for Monday morning.
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Use a weekly planning sheet and fill in each day’s subjects and lessons plans.
Keeping your entire week’s homeschool plans in front of you will not only help you stay on track, but it will also enable you to see how you can move things around should a difficult concept or rabbit trail come up. If your children are older (4th grade+) I recommend giving them a weekly lesson plan and checklist as well.
- Prepare all of your school supplies at the beginning of the week (doing it each weekend would be better).
Sharpen pencils, gather art supplies, ensure erasers, rulers, tape, scissors and glue sticks are in their places, etc. This will keep you from being asked where things are all week long.
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Organize the entire week’s lessons in pocket folders, binders or workboxes.
Whatever organization system works best for you and/or your kids, use it! Keeping everything together and have the entire week’s worth of lesson plans, printables, etc. organized and ready will keep your kids on track and it will help you have a successful homeschool week!
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Gather all completed lessons, activities, etc. at the end of the week and organize them by subject in file folders.
This will help you and your kids be able to find things easily if they need them and it will keep you organized all year which will make wrapping up at the end of the school year easy!
These 7 steps have help me tremendously as I’ve moved to a weekly homeschool planning schedule. It’s important to remember that what works for me may not work for you. 1 of these steps may help you or 5 of them may be what you need, don’t feel committed to following all 7 steps I’ve shared if you don’t need to! Find the weekly homeschool planning schedule/method that works just right for you and stick with it to ensure your weekly homeschool planning remains as stress free as possible!
How do you plan a week’s worth of homeschooling?
