There are two different types of planning that are important in homeschooling. They are…
…“Big Picture Planning” and “Detailed Planning”.
The Big Picture Plan is a zoomed-out view of our kids’ entire education. All the subjects. All the years. Everything from ABC and 123 up through high school graduation.
Big Picture Planning helps us with things like:
- Staying focused on our own family’s goals
- Choosing the best resources and activities to fill our time
- Saying “no” to curricula that isn’t a good fit
The Detailed Plan is the opposite. It’s a zoomed-in view of the day-to-day, nitty-gritty. Monthly, weekly, and daily plans allow us to accomplish things and make steady progress toward our Big Picture goals.
Detailed Planning helps us with things like:
- Knowing which school supplies to put on the back-to-school shopping list
- Checking out the right books for next week’s history lesson
- Knowing what to actually DO on Monday
I’ve written about different parts of my own homeschool planning process in the past. But in this post I’ll pull all the pieces together so you can see the entire process from start to finish.
We’ll start with the big, zoomed-out view and go from there!
How to Plan Your Homeschool
Step 1: Lay the Groundwork
In my post, First Things First: PRAY!, I wrote that it’s important to bring all our decisions and situations to God to find clarity, direction, and peace. I’ve never been more aware of the importance of this truth than I have been in our homeschooling journey.
Before you do anything else, be sure to lay the groundwork for your homeschool planning by asking God to lead your decision making process!
And, as you pray and think about your homeschool, be sure to answer the most important question which is… (spoiler alert)….“Why?”
Why have you decided to educate your kids at home? Why is this the best choice for your family right now? Why are you doing this?
If you aren’t yet able to answer this question, take a look at this post: The Most Important Question to Answer Before Homeschooling before coming back here and reading on.
Step 2: Casting the Vision
After the groundwork is laid, the vision-casting can begin. Once you can articulate WHY you’ve chosen to educate your kid(s) at home, you can start thinking through your goals and logistics.
In Step 1, you answered “Why” you’ll be homeschooling. In Step 2, you’ll answer the rest of the “W” (plus one “H”) questions.
You don’t need the answers to all of these questions immediately. And some of the answers will change over time anyway. But once you decide to educate at home, it’s fun (and necessary!) to start envisioning what it will be like and how you’ll go about it.
Some of these vision-casting questions are very practical:
- Who? Who will be doing the day-to-day teaching in your homeschool? Will mom and dad share the responsibility? Will one of you tackle certain subjects while the other is at work? Will other family members or friends help regularly in some way?
- Where? Will you have a dedicated homeschool room or bookshelf in the dining room for your homeschool supplies? Are there other individual workspaces in your house, or a patio, or the library that you can use for a change of scenery? Will some of your subjects be done at a co-op or at grandma’s house? (Check out this post to see how we homeschool all over the house.)
- When? How will homeschooling fit into your family’s schedule? Might some of your work be done in the evenings or on weekends? Will you follow your local public school’s calendar and have a summer break? What do you see your routine looking like? (We’ve loved this schedule best over the years.)
Other vision-casting questions are less practical and more philosophical:
- What? What are your long term educational goals for your kids? What are the laws in your state regarding what subjects must be covered? (If you’re not sure, you can find out here). Are there certain topics you want to teach even though they’re not required (like Biblical Studies, logic courses, or test prep classes, for example)? Is college an important goal for some or all of your students? Do any of your kids already have an interest or ability in certain areas that you’ll want to emphasize?
- How? Are there certain educational approaches that resonate with you? Do you lean toward a child-led, relaxed approach or a more classical, structured style of teaching? How do you think your kids learn best?
Phew! Okay, take a deep breath. I’m sorry for bombarding you with all those questions at once. Like I said, you definitely do NOT have to have all the answers right now!
The key is just to answer enough of them that you can get started. After that, you’ll be able to tweak your plans and goals based on your experiences and lessons learned.
Step 3: Big Picture Academic Plan
Okay, are you still with me? Hang in there – now we’re getting to the fun stuff!
Once you’ve gotten the groundwork laid and you have a general idea of how to move forward, the next step is to give some thought to each child’s academic journey.
Depending when you start homeschooling, the scope of this will vary. Our family homeschooled from the beginning, so early on I created a ginormous spreadsheet to organize all my plans and ideas for my kids’ K-12th grade school careers. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m a nerd and an over-planner.)
Side Note: It’s come to my attention that not everyone has the same affection for spreadsheets as I do (shocking, I know). So don’t feel like you have to organize your ideas in the same way as me. A friend of mine uses a binder with pages for each year of each child’s schooling. If, for example, she finds an idea for a 3rd grade math curriculum to use two years from now, she’d just stick a Post-It note on her son’s 3rd grade idea page for future reference. In any case, use whatever method works for you to keep track of what you’ve done and what you plan to do.
The technical term for my big ‘ol academic planning spreadsheet is a “Master Course of Study.” I use it to list all the subject areas we’ll eventually need to cover during my kids’ K-12th grade school career.
You can download a template of this file for *FREE* – no strings attached – in PDF or Excel format:
Over the years, I’ve used it in several ways:
I use it to keep track of the curriculum for the upcoming year. But I also add in ideas for future years as I come across them. So when I get to those years, I can thank my past-self for already having brainstormed some ideas.
This master spreadsheet is also a great place to see how multi-volume curricula will fill the next few years. I have each of my kids’ plans in columns side-by-side, so I can also easily see if it would work to do certain subjects together each year.
My big picture academic plan also doubles as a record of what we’ve actually done. I typically look at it each summer when I’m planning what we’ll do the following year. Then I update it sporadically throughout the year to make sure any mid-year curriculum changes are recorded. Even in states where detailed records aren’t technically required, as your kids’ school administrator it’s super important to have a record of what they’ve done academically.
This Master Course of Study has been such a helpful tool over our entire homeschooling journey! You can find out a lot more about it in Homeschool Planning with a Master Course of Study.
Step 4: Yearly Calendar & Academic Plan
If you’ve done all the legwork so far in Steps 1 to 3, you’ll have a much easier time with the remaining steps of more detailed planning!
There are two parts to this next step.
The first task is to solidify your choices about the coming year’s curricula/classes. If you have your big picture academic plan laid out from Step 3, you’ll have a great head start on this – in fact it might already be done if your past-self was an overachiever!
Your yearly academic plan is where you’ll make final decisions about what resources, curriculum, or strategy you’ll use to teach each subject to each child. So maybe you’ll use Math-U-See Alpha for your first grader’s math. And you’ll use Story of the World Vol. II together with all your kids for history/geography. And gym and art will be covered for them all at your co-op. This is the step to get all those decisions sorted out.
I’ve got examples of our yearly academic plans for every year we’ve homeschooled – you can find links to all of those here: Our Curriculum Choices Year By Year.
The next part of this step is to plan out the calendar for your school year. Early in the summer (or, ideally, before the end of the current school year), I try to figure out the next school year’s calendar. I cover this step thoroughly (probably a little too thoroughly) in How to Plan Your Homeschool Calendar: A Step by Step Guide.
With your yearly academic plan and school year calendar in hand, you’ll have a good overview of what the year will look like. Yay you! Full steam ahead to the detailed planning!
Step 5: Weekly Lesson Plans
Weekly lesson plans are where you write down the specifics of what you’ll do each school week.
Let’s say you’ve decided to use Story of the World (SotW) Volume I for history with your kids this year. You’ve bought the curriculum and even skimmed through it. But when you open the book on the first day of school…
- How will you know how many chapters to read this week to finish the book by the end of the year?
- How can you avoid disappointing the kids when you realize you don’t have the supplies needed for that day’s activity?
- How will you quickly find a kid-appropriate supplemental video without derailing the lesson and wasting time?
Weekly lesson plan to the rescue!
Your lesson plans are where you’ll write out as much detail as you need so you’ll know what to actually do on each school day for each subject.
Depending on your personality and on the subject, a “weekly lesson plan” can mean a lot of different things. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, it won’t surprise you that lesson planning, for me, involves a spreadsheet.
You can download a template of this file for *FREE* – still no strings attached – in PDF or Excel format:
How much detail you include in your lesson plans depends a lot on your own personality, experience level, and preferences. In my earlier years of homeschooling, I used to include a lot more detail in my lesson planning spreadsheet. Here’s a sample of what I did years ago for just history (for one week with all of my kids)!
Now that I’m more lazy experienced, I find my lesson plans are typically more succinct. The sample below shows a full week of lessons (all subjects) for my 3rd grade daughter.
The level of detail in your weekly lesson plans will also depend on the subject and the curriculum.
For example, our logic curriculum is a simple, open-and-go workbook. I can just write in “pg 1-3” or “Lesson 2” and that’s all that’s needed. By laying it out in my spreadsheet ahead of time, I can be sure we’ll work at a pace to finish the book by the end of the school year.
History and science, on the other hand, have often needed more detail. I add extra notes to myself to make sure I’m prepared with any extra activity supplies, printouts, video links, or library books that will be needed each week.
If you do a lot of schoolwork together as a family, you might find it helps to organize your lesson plans by subject. But if your kids are each doing their own things, it might be better to organize your plans by child.
This is usually the most time consuming, detailed part of planning. But it’s also one of my favorite parts of the job!
Step 6: Kids’ Daily Planners
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! This is exactly the kind of dedication and patience you’ll need to homeschool successfully!
At this point, your planning cake is pretty much done. Now we’ll just add the icing.
So far, all of this planning (big picture, yearly calendar, lesson plans, etc.) are things that my kids never see. They’re just files on my computer that I reference so I know what to do on Monday.
The final step is simply to get these details – for example, which math lessons to do this week – somewhere where the kids can see them so they know what to do on Monday.
When my kids were in preschool, we used work boxes instead of a to-do list.
Once they were elementary aged, I transitioned them to a daily planner.
You can download a template of this file for *FREE* in PDF or Excel format. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s gotten the job done for us for years!
Each weekend, I fill out their to-do list for the week ahead using our household calendar and weekly lesson plans (from Step 5). I walk through exactly how I do this in my post, How to Plan Your Homeschool Week: A Step-by-Step Guide.
As my kids have reached middle school, I’ve had them start filling in portions of their own school to-do list. Together we look at our family’s calendar for the week and decide what work they’ll do on which day.
By high school my kids are fully responsible for their own planners. I simply print out their portion of my lesson planning spreadsheet and give it to them at the beginning of the year (just like a school teacher would hand out a syllabus). This is great experience for them and less work for me… win-win!
Phew! We’ve covered a lot, so I’ll summarize it here one more time.
- Step 1: Lay the Groundwork —> Pray & Know Your “Why”
- Step 2: Casting the Vision —> Set Goals & Answer “Who, What, Where, When, How?”
- Step 3: Big Picture Academic Plan —> Create a K-12 Master Course of Study
- Step 4: Yearly Calendar & Academic Plan —> Decide on School Year Calendar & Resources
- Step 5: Weekly Lesson Plans —> Make Detailed Plans for All Subjects & Kids
- Step 6: Kids’ Daily Planners —> Communicate the Daily To-Do’s to the Kids
I hope this step-by-step look at my homeschool planning process has helped give you some ideas as you plan your own school year!
Though your current self might rather be eating ice cream at the beach, try to carve out some time to make big-picture and detailed plans for your homeschool. Your future self will thank you!
(Come to think of it, you could make both your current and future selves happy at the same time by doing your homeschool planning AT the beach! Don’t forget the ice cream!)
Happy planning!
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