Plan for the year
This year I found it hard to get my head into homeschooling after a much-needed relaxing summer holiday! But I did eventually manage some planning, although it happened a little later than intended.
Here are the key areas I plan at the start of each year:
- Overall plan for the year
- Rough weekly timetable
- Checklists for the kids
- Extra activities
1. Overall plan for the year
For this I work my way through each subject area and decide what I would like our goals to be for the year. It’s a great opportunity to look into new curriculum or add in new subjects. Starting with the subjects we all do together such as Bible, Science, Art, and Culture, I come up with topics for each term and ideas for resources. Since we are pretty flexible and add things in as we go, I don’t plan this too rigidly. Once this is sketched out I decide what each child should be working on and aiming to finish by the end of the year for subjects such as Maths, Writing, Reading, Spelling and Grammar.
I find without an overall plan I can actually end up trying to do too much – it gives me some limits and clear objectives!
2. Rough weekly timetable
Usually my timetable from the previous year just needs a bit of tweaking to account for any change in activities. I don’t generally revamp the whole schedule if it’s working pretty well. We tend to stick with the academic subjects in the mornings and activities, art, craft, and sport in the afternoons. We aim to achieve the bulk of our work from Monday to Thursday, then use Friday to catch up on anything missed.
3. Checklists for the kids
It’s really helpful for the kids to have some way of checking off their work. As mentioned in this post, I have done a lot of experimenting with the best method to achieve this. This year I decided to try giving them a specific list for the whole week, rather than for each day. Hopefully this will encourage them to plan their days well (not rushing their work) but also teach them to work hard and earn extra free time on Friday.
Because each separate item for the week is listed it does end up looking like quite a lot! We’ll see how it goes and review whether it’s working for them a few weeks in.
4. Extra activities
Finally, I have a think about which extra activities we’d like to be involved in. This includes the cross country, the history and science fairs and classes such as swimming or technology. I consider our timetable, our busyness levels and of course the affordability. My preference is to streamline activities – e.g. all younger ones do swimming lessons and older ones do something else together, rather than driving all over the place. Obviously interests and enthusiasm levels factor into this too. With Covid thrown in to the mix we aren’t doing a whole lot at the moment.
I’m not the world’s greatest planner, but a little planning does go a long way! To be honest, I usually try to cram way too much into our school work schedules, so most likely I will drop some things to make way for those subjects we neglected last year. I’m optimistic that we might actually achieve more this year without the disruption of pregnancy and childbirth!
