Homeschooling 101: Planning Your Weeks

Welcome back to our Homeschooling 101 series. Today’s installment is our final one in the series, and we’ll talk about planning your weeks. If you haven’t read our previous posts in this series, you might want to catch them first:

Step 1: Pray It Up
Step 2: Choosing Your Curriculum and Extra-Curricular Activities
Step 3: Planning Your Year

Once you’ve planned out your year, planning your weeks should be fairly simple. At this point, you should already have your extra-curricular activities in your planner, including all field trips, sports, ballet, art lessons, foreign language tutoring, etc. You should also have an idea of how many chapters/lessons, etc. you need to cover in each subject on a weekly basis. The next step is getting it all written down in your weekly planner.

Here’s a little secret about homeschooling: As long as you get the work done, it’s up to you as to what you do when. If you want to spend all day Monday knocking out your math for the week, go ahead. If you have a lot of extra-curricular activities on Thursday, by all means get your book work done earlier in the week. If you need to leave home early on Wednesday nights for church, just do four subjects that day. If you’d really just like to do grammar on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, have at it. As long as you get it all done, you are free to set your own schedule. As you can see above, I do write it all down on specific days (my daughter actually wrote that week – my handwriting is a little better:) but if we do six lessons of math on Monday, I mark off that many and we move onto something else the next day. The only subjects I enforce the schedule with are the ones where we have a test coming up and I don’t want MA to wait too late to begin, which would throw off our test schedule. For example, we do history and spelling tests every Friday, so we’ll start those early in the week and not wait until Wednesday, to give her time to learn the material before the test. Clear as mud?

The beauty of homeschooling is that you have the freedom to plan your days in ways that best suit your family. If your kiddos are night owls who can concentrate on spelling words at 9:00 pm, then by all means do your spelling when they’re best ready to learn. In our house, we like to knock out the work early in the morning so we can finish by mid-afternoon. That’s what works best for us, so we stick to it. But you have the flexibility to choose for yourself. Our fall is usually a pretty busy time with soccer, ballet, and church activities starting again, so we sometimes lighten our book work load in fall and just make it up in winter. That works well for us. As you begin to get a little experience with homeschooling, you will discover a flow that works best for you. Go with it.

I hope this series has been helpful for you. If so, please feel free to share it with others that it might encourage.

All the best from our homeschool to yours!