How to Plan Your Homeschool Year

Ah, Summer… My favorite season… Sprinklers, sidewalk chalk, swimming pools and homeschool planning. That’s right, most homeschoolers, whether new or seasoned, are currently in the throes of planning for the next homeschool year and anxiously awaiting school supply sales. 

Before you sign up for all the extracurricular activities and order your curriculum, read this!

When I first started homeschooling my kids, I spent hours and hours pouring over curricula and making the perfect homeschool plan for the ideal year, weeks and days. But within a month of real life, the plan was abandoned in favor of “winging it” day to day. This is the same challenge as yo-yo dieting, trashed to untrashed house and budgeting to uncontrolled spending when we have a perfectionistic ideal or a general lack of discipline. I am chief among sinners in this area!

Allow me to share with you the homeschool planning method I now use. It’s simple, and allows for freedom and flexibility to adapt for your family and real life along the way. 

Homeschool Plan Budget

I was homeschooled growing up and as a seasoned homeschool mom myself, it’s too easy to get caught up in the excitement of planning and buying for the entire year. But I have learned to pump the brakes and not let the shopping craze kick into overdrive. Especially when crayons are only 50 cents a box! It’s taken years to develop discipline over our homeschool budget. We choose to live debt-free and I’d rather not have homeschool be the thing that blows the budget. We prefer to spend our hard earned money on experiences and adventures, not pencils and textbooks. That’s a personal choice. Everyone has a different expendable income and priorities, so I’ll let you decide what dollar amount you’re comfortable with. However, I’ve always felt that if homeschooling begins to cost as much as a private, christian education, I’m definitely spending way too much! 

My recommendation is to consider your monthly and yearly budget for your homeschool plan. This includes curriculum, supplies and extracurricular activities. What are you willing to spend on education? And as much as we’d all like to say, “no price is too high!”, we all have a finite amount of money to spend on homeschool. When I first removed my kids from the public school system as a single parent, my budget was “spend as little as humanly possible!” So I found a free online curriculum that aligned with our learning style and goals, Ambleside Online, and bought a pile of printer paper and a couple 3 ring binders. We also enrolled in a local homeschool co-op to make friends and do extra classes that I wasn’t yet ready to teach, like LARP and science experiments. We are still a part of that same homeschool co-op to this day! 

So whatever your limit is, determine the yearly budget and then break it down into semester or monthly chunks. This makes it easier to work into your monthly, debt-free budget. Some people buy their curriculum for the whole year in the summer, when everything is on sale. That’s often the biggest expense all at once, so consider saving a little bit every month throughout the year starting in September so you have enough set aside next year for curriculum purchases. 

Plan for Socialization

This is the biggest (and most annoying) question most homeschoolers receive: “How do you socialize your children?” I have all sorts of sassy comebacks that are only ever said in my head or to other homeschool parents who can relate: “You socialize your dogs, not your kids,” “How were you socialized?” “I don’t want my kids to learn social skills only from other kids…” you get the idea. The ironic thing is most homeschool families I know are doing TOO MANY things in the name of socialization! This is an area my family growing up and my own family have chosen to be selective on. Growing up, we lived about an hour from civilization, so going to a homeschool gathering or extracurricular activities took more gas and time. Both of my parents are introverts, so it also took more energy! I get it now, Mom! I remember doing weekly piano lessons, monthly roller skating and twice a year skiing. That was really about it besides church activities. 

Consider the Season of Life

For our family, we have had varying degrees of involvement, depending on the season of life. There have been seasons when we only did the Fall co-op and other seasons, like the current one, when we are able and want to do more. Last year, I graduated my oldest son who was my most reluctant (read: frustrating) and introverted student. This bittersweet milestone has allowed me to open my mental space to taking a more involved role in our local homeschool community. This year, we are doing the Fall homeschool co-op (of which I am one of the administrators & my husband teaches LARP), American Heritage Girls & Trail Life, theater and a homeschool field trip group. All of these things align with our goal this year to engage in more family adventures and fuel each person’s strengths. 

Take these things into consideration for yourself as well! Don’t sign up for a bunch of stuff if you know you don’t have the energy in this season of life to do them. You’ll only wear yourself out and experience mom guilt for bailing midway through the commitment. Also, you have to leave space and time for actual school. Whether you use a curriculum or not, it’s important to make sure you don’t overschedule yourself to the point where you’re burned out or don’t have the capacity to do learning time. 

In my observation, overscheduling is a bigger problem than lack of socialization for most homeschoolers.

Homeschool Timetable

First things first, Double check HSLDA.org to be sure you’re meeting your state’s requirements for how many school days you need to have. This will be super important to keep track of as you make your schedule and can be retained as part of your records. 

Year-round or traditional school year, that is the question. There are pros and cons for both sides, so you have to determine what you think will work best for your family. If you’ve been homeschooling for a while, consider switching things up. This is an area I have been willing to flex on… maybe too much at times. But different seasons will call for different schedules. 

We have tried the traditional school year and we live in an area where summers are short and winters are long, so you’d think that would work better. However, I hate the months of review that ensue when school resumes. And we struggle with reimplementing a school routine after a long break. Year round schooling works best for our family. We take a more relaxed approach to homeschooling during the summer, so it still feels like a little REST without losing all academic traction. I’ve also more recently found that the Sabbath rhythm works well for us to get intentional breaks throughout the year. 

Holidays

Take out a yearlong calendar like this one and mark any holidays you want to take. We like to take birthdays off. So instead of Martin Luther King, Jr Day off from school, my oldest would get his birthday off, which was his favorite birthday present, I’m sure. 

If you’re doing year round schooling and want to try the Sabbath Rhythm approach, here’s when you’d insert your break weeks. We do 6 weeks of school, followed by one week off. Rinse and repeat. That one week off gives the kids (and me) an intentional pause and allows me to make short term adjustments to our homeschool. That week is like a short recess for not only refreshment, but also a calibration assessment of how things are going in our homeschool.

After you block off single holidays and Sabbath weeks, it’s time to plan extended holidays. Is your family planning a vacation? This is when you block out your Christmas break, Summer break, Spring break, etc. I always think it’s fun to intentionally plan our breaks and family holidays!

Lastly, double check your number of school days to make sure you’re meeting your state’s requirements. I like to plan for 10 days more than required. This leaves us with a cushion for flex days for spontaneous adventures or sick days. In our area, the winters can be long, dreary and brutal. And while public schoolers get snow days when the buses can’t run, we prefer to take sunny days, sledding days, ski days or lake days instead. To each his own! 

Curriculum/Learning Plan

Now that you have your budget, activities and school days set, it’s time to decide what you’ll be doing during those precious learning times. Be realistic about how much time you’ll have for school time each day/week. When I first started homeschooling, I was a single parent, so I needed our school schedule to fit around my work schedule. Whatever your situation, be honest with yourself about how much time you’ll spend each day on studies. This will help narrow down what, if any, curriculum you’ll want to use to help you achieve your goal. Read more about how to choose the best curriculum here. For us, this has shifted a little bit almost yearly, becoming more relaxed and closer to a blend of Charlotte Mason and Unschooling over time. It’s totally okay to make adjustments to your curriculum and approach as seasons and life change. This is one of the best parts about homeschooling: flexibility and adaptability! But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you’ve found a math curriculum that you and your kids love and learn well with, don’t swap it out for something an influencer or well meaning friend loves. Stick with what works for you! This has been a huge pitfall for me. Sometimes I’ve been too willing to be flexible and left my kids with academic whiplash! Lol 

Stick with what works, but be willing to change what doesn’t. 

If you choose to forego the curriculum and freestyle instead, you might plug in a monthly theme, holiday studies or unit studies you’d like to do. Also, determine what your weekly rhythm will look like. In our homeschool, we like to do more structured work 4 days/week and then have an educational field trip on one day/week. This gets us out of the house on more adventures (of course) and taking in more of our local museums and parks. This can be anything from a simple nature walk to visiting a friend’s hobby farm. 

This is homeschool, so get creative! 

Remember that our goal is not to recreate the public school schedule and rhythm, but to find what works best for your family. So have fun with the process and let go of what you think it “should be” according to “them.” Don’t compare yourself to other homeschools. Be willing to experiment a little and make adjustments (even midyear) if needed. HSLDA.org is your best resource for state requirements for record keeping and state required subjects. Other than that, feel free to color outside the lines! 

I’d love to hear from you!

What is your best homeschool plan tip? Drop it in the comments!