Hi friends!
I thought I would share a little bit on how I go about planning our homeschool. Thus far with a kindergartner and preschooler, it has been pretty simple. I plan on keeping it simple, even as the years go on.
The first thing that you should know is that I use a simple notebook as a planner. I tried a fancy planner one year. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, but I just found a lot of the pages unnecessary. It felt like more blank space than anything else. I prefer a simple notebook because it takes no time for me to customize it exactly how I want it.
A notebook will work differently for everyone, but here is how I have mine set up:
- 1st page – I print out a year-at-a-glance calendar and highlight the weeks we plan to do school (knowing it could change, but I like having a general idea)
- 2nd page – Goals for each child
- I skip 1-2 pages and then have a page for curriculum and resources
- I skip another page and make a headline for read alouds
- I skip another 1-2 pages and and make a headline for field trips
- I skip another 1-2 pages and make a headline for our first month of school (August in this case)
- I use 1 page and write “August 2023 Overview” (I include general notes and ideas here as necessary, like random projects I hope for us to get done or unit study ideas)
- Next page is August Book List
- Next 6-7 pages I leave blank and will use to “plan from behind” our days. To plan from behind simply means that I write down what we do each day after we do it instead of planning ahead of time. I have found that this way of documenting our days works best for our family.
- Then I move onto September 2023 Overview, September Book List, and more blank pages for our daily notes until I get all the way to May 2023.
- That’s it!
As you can see, I like a lot of white space in case I need extra room, so I am pretty generous with blank pages.
One thing that really helps me to be able to plan from behind is that we use open-and-go curriculum for our core subjects, which means we just do the next lesson with minimal planning. So for example, our core subjects are reading/phonics, math, and handwriting. All of these are easy to just pick up where we left off the next day. I simply document the lesson we completed and we keep moving. That is the beauty of following your child’s pace.
For other subjects such as history/science/geography/art/whatever else, we treat these as bonus/fun subjects and they are mostly interest-led or I plan a unit study based on what I think my kids would enjoy. This year, we are doing a mammal unit study which you can find here. So much of these subjects are also covered through read alouds or seasonal crafts/projects. This is the fun stuff that adds beauty and variety to our days! It’s the stuff that makes our homeschool feel enchanted.
Do I plan this all at once? Sometimes. For the mammals unit, I spent time curating booklists and resources for the whole year to get it done. However, for most, I only really plan 1-2 months at a time. I recently sat down and plotted out September and October. This includes curating a monthly booklist (this takes up the majority of my time but I enjoy it so so much), finding a few crafts and activities that coincide with the season/month, jotting down a few board games we can play, finding a couple science experiments (I only do this because my daughter is super into science at the moment), or whatever else I think we might wanna do. Do we get to it all? Never. I just like to have all the ideas written out on the monthly overview page so I have something to pull inspiration from.
So for example, in September, I am planning on a small unit study on the state we live in with a few books, projects, and field trips to coincide. Also hoping to put together a family tree. I jotted down 1-2 kitchen science experiments to have ready when she asks. In October, we will start our mammals unit study, as well as focus on seasonal crafts and stories having to do with fall, leaves, pumpkins, etc. It took an hour or so for me to find ideas and jot them down and now I have a good handle on fun things to weave into our days aside from our core work and reading aloud.
That’s pretty much it! I’ll probably plot out November/December around mid-October. This is working really well for us right now. I hope that all of this has made sense, too. Haha! It might seem like a lot to some of you or it might not seem like enough to some… but it is just enough for us. It is enough structure for my type-A personality so that I can check things off, but not too demanding and rigid that I become stressed. I truly aim for a relaxed homeschool environment.
I hope that this was insightful and has inspired something in you. Thanks for reading and being here. x
Interested in seeing a list of all our favorite homeschool resources? You can find it HERE.
