How to Plan Your Homeschool Year Under the Gun

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With September in full swing, I am starting to think about school. I know what you are thinking….shouldn’t you have done this months ago. The answer is a resounding yes!!! However, that is not usually how I roll. I seem to do my best work under the gun. Although, I have to admit it drives me crazy. Am I the only one???

Today, we are going to talk about How to plan your homeschool year under the gun as this is day one of my homeschool planning sessions.

I am a fan of lists. So, the first step is….you guessed it! Make a list.

List all your kids out and every subject they need in their school day. Each child’s list may very depending on grade level and interests.
Now, make a separate list (may take multiple pages) with each subject. Here is where I start filling in the curriculum/material I will use for each child. Here is what mine looks like. It starts as a very rough copy, but will continue to morph as we go.

Some subjects you may only use one resource for all your kids. For example, I have 6 kids ranging from grade 10 to grade 1. For science we will be studying the Human Body. I will be using Apolgia for my guide, but it will look a bit differently for the different grade levels.

3. Gather, gather, gather. From the list of subjects I start searching for the resources I hope to use. I write down where I found them. This year our homeschool budget is extremely tight so I am looking for free resources. I do subscribe to schoolhouseteachers.com* and pay a low monthly fee, but I am trying not to spend anything over that. I still have a couple months left on our CTC Math membership so we will use that and decide later if we will continue to use that as our math resource.

4. Once I figure out the subjects each child will study and the resources we will use from here I can start penciling out time frames and schedules.

5. At this point I start a file (either digital or hard copy) for each child’s subjects and resources.

6. Now, is the fun part…penciling out lesson plans. I try to figure out my lesson plans weekly. I have done monthly and even yearly, but inevitably something happens and throws a wrench in my plans. So instead of having to re-figure every thing I work on a week by week basis with a monthly goal in mind.

Right now, I am still gathering all of my resources, but I have a great start. My goal is to start our main subjects by the end of the week and be in full force on Monday.

Hope this helps you to plan your homeschool! Unless of course you are one of those people that are on the ball and have already started your school routines 😉

Blessings to you all!

Kelly