Planning A Homeschool Year

Planning a year’s worth of curriculum can be overwhelming … so if this isn’t for you - you do you! But, personally, I love this process and it helps me brain dump a lot of thoughts running through my head and provides a little bit larger lens for me to view our options. For me, I find overwhelm comes when I don’t have anything planned and I am scrambling to think of ideas to fill the time or getting too overwhelmed because there are SO many good options and then I don’t do anything at all. So planning and organizing my thoughts and ideas help me narrow things down. I like to be intentional, but flexible. So, this is a process - especially choosing curriculum - that I am very prayerful about a long the way. We need the Spirit’s guidance in this because there is a much larger vision here we can’t see and He will help guide us and personalize what our children need to learn and how are families can grow together in this process. Every year, we have stuck really close to our year long plans. But, for example, last year, I polished up our plans in the summer, and, guess what? We had a special spiritual experience in August I obviously didn’t see coming and ultimately that influenced our decision to read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a Christmas unit in December. Studying Narnia was one of our best and most spiritually uplifting units! But, I needed to have a special experience first — which came after my plans were written — so while I love to have a plan - I also want to say it is equally important - if not more - to be flexible and allow the Spirit to take the lead when you feel those promptings. I would never want to schedule so much and be so rigid that we couldn’t “hear” what direction we needed to go.

Another important part of planning is to include your children. I am constantly asking for their opinions and want to know what they’re interested in. But, one thing I have learned is to act upon their interests sooner than later because young children’s interests tend to quickly change. At the beginning of the school year, I like to have a more formal “homeschool interview” where I take each child aside and hear what they’re interested in and also ask them questions about our family life. Here are some really basic questions you can bounce off of. I print these off with the answers and save them. But, throughout the year I try to make sure I ask them and re-evaluate and make sure we are on the “right” track and by that I mean — still nourishing all of our hearts. What if next March we are just not interested in a topic we had originally planned? I might spend one day on that topic so it’s something I can introduce to my kids and spend the rest of the week veering into one of their interests. Again, embracing the flexibility here.

When picking out curriculum and then mapping out how you will use that curriculum - people often ask me, where do I start? There are general subjects you rotate through each year and those are pretty set - like math, language arts, science and social studies, right? I typically make a list under each subject of the curriculums I’m researching. And, then once I decide on a curriculum I stick them into a digital spreadsheet and break it all down. I think the easiest way to plan a whole year is to start big and work down small. I think of it like a vessel - first, break down your year by month — then week — then day. It’s that simple! One thing I can’t exemplify here very well, and to keep in mind, is that I can change and adjust dates and times in our curriculum map. It is why I found I preferred this as a digital version versus writing everything down…so if we are “behind” or “ahead” - I can just move a column over - no big deal and waalaa we are no longer “behind!” If I decide not to do something - delete. If I want to add something - easy! This changes and evolves just as our lives and personal progress does. And, it also allows us to adjust plans if the Spirit directs us otherwise. A harder question people have asked is how long does this take? If you utilize these materials, you may do it totally different than I do…but each time I’ve done it this way - it’s been different and the amount of time has varied. Most of the time is spent researching curriculum for an entire year (again, I can’t emphasize how important it is to utilize the Spirit in this process) Plugging it into the spreadsheet is simple and doesn’t take much time at all - if you have the curriculum picked out you’d like to use - just break down some monthly goals and plug it in - this could easily be done in an evening. To give you a bit bigger picture though - the very first time I did this - it only took me a few weeks - I was prayerful and the answers to what curriculum we were going to use just came really easily. I needed a quick answer - and I got it! The next time I did this - it also was a fairly quick process - a few weeks at most. However, this year, I feel like it took a lot longer. I started researching curriculums in April and didn’t find all my answers until the end of June. It’s interesting though because during this time I can see the evolution and timing of the Lord’s hand and how powerful that was for my own learning. I simply couldn’t have planned everything in April because things that unfolded in May and June I didn’t even know about - learning and consuming information from Well Educated Heart was a huge part of this - and my experience with this content needed to happen first! And, quite frankly, I wasn’t in a hurry to plan this year, so no biggie! So, I have just been working in this spreadsheet as I made decisions on curriculums a little here and a little there. But, just remember this entire process is something that evolves and changes and if you find this helpful - the best part is you can personalize it to work best for you!

DOWNLOAD BLANK YEAR AT A GLANCE CURRICULUM MAP HERE - This is a google drive version of the spreadsheet I use to look at an entire year. This may not download well on a phone. If you’re looking for an excel version use THIS version - it is saved on a Mac so older PC systems may have a difficult time opening this file. If all else fails, feel free to just make your own and use my image below as an idea. :) Personally, I plan and save everything on the google drive so it is always easy to access.

THIS is an example of our 2021-2022 curriculum map. I’ve made lots of personalizations here so it looks a little different than the one I have linked below but you can bounce off of either. I also took off our family life and vacations for this example, but normally that is filled out. I hestitated posting this because it is pretty detailed, but I had a few people ask…just know you can totally simplify this! You could simply write in the curriculum you’re using and in what months and call it good! You don’t need to add all the extra rows with supplements and such - just make it work for you!

Now, the next questions I always get asked is what next? How do you plan out your weeks and days? And when do you prep everything? After, I map out a year - I’ll work in my hand-written planner to jot down notes, supplies, and any weekly and then daily prep I need to do. I use Leafy Treetop Academic Planners because, of course I love the LDS specific content. I bounced back between this and Erin Condren planners for years (even before homeschooling) and these ultimately have become my favorite! I keep all of our family life and homeschool life in this planner (I don’t use two separate ones.) Mapping out a month by week is super easy with this planner because you just break it down one more level and you can organize it by any subject because all of the boxes are blank. I wrote up an example of the weeks in September below. This will give you a good idea of what is possible and how you might use it. There are so many page options but this is just the one that I prefer best to view the entire month. (With this particular page you could also write out the days of the week at top and assign a number to a subject and use it as a larger week-at-a-glance planner. There are also lots of pages on here where I’ve used to plan unit studies and make lists of books and supplies or project ideas.

On the weekly spread that breaks down each day I keep all the details of our home/family/school/everything life (appointments and activities), grocery lists (also use my Alexa for this and combine the two each week), meal planning, school goals, supply lists, and just all the things! I’ll write little notes about what I need to prep coming up — or something I need to remember. Most of the curriculum we are using this year - we just open and work through the lessons, so I don’t get super detailed on my day planner, but enough so that I know what is going on and where we are headed. I have another example in the boxes below. But, I will say, this is the first year I tried vertical boxes instead of horizontal boxes - I was thinking I’d like to break up home/school/other activities, but, I don’t like it nearly as much as the horizontal lines where I would just make notes about our days. This is totally customizable to your preference and they have examples of all the options on their site (see the link I posted above), but next time I’ll be back to ordering one with horizontal boxes. And, as far as prepping materials - since I have an idea of what is going on and coming up - it becomes so much easier to pace myself and see what I might need to be prepping each week or if it’s something I can just prep a few weeks to months in advance.

The next step is figuring out the rhythm/flow/schedule to each day to start DOING all your plans. Now, you’re breaking it down by hour…we usually time block, but this will look so different for everyone especially depending on the stages our kids are in. I have an entire page coming on that soon because this year is going to look a little different than the last few years.

One last thing I wanted to mention - was, last year, my husband commented he needed a visual of our schedule. It’s all in my head or in my little planner but he was often clueless to what was going on. I’m not sure why I never considered this, ha! Right about this time my twins also started to want to know what was going on so I bought a 2x3 foot year-long month-at-a-glance calendar for our family life that I keep right by a door going out to our garage. I just transfer over our appointments and activities (nothing school related) so everyone else has an idea of what is going on. We’ve loved this calendar so much and it’s worked perfectly so I’ll give you the link HERE just in case you’re interested in something similar. THIS is the exact wall hanger frame we use for it and it makes it simple to rotate the month.

I hope this helps give you a little more insight to how I organize our plans and my thoughts. Feel free to message me if you have any other questions! Have fun planning away!