Planning your children's home school year does not have to be the difficult task it appears to be. Together we are going to break this down into bite sized pieces to manage even the most difficult curriculum planning chores.
The first step is to decide what curriculum you want your children to utilize for the current school year. The more complete your curriculum choices are, the better chance you have of successfully planning your whole school year in one sitting. You also need to have those books already purchased and sitting in front of you so you can analyze them before getting started on your home school lesson planning.
To analyze your books, you need to open each book and make note of several of the features of the book. The things you need to notate are:
Number of Pages
Number of Chapters
Average Number of Pages in Each Chapter
Natural Breaks or Ending Points
Once you have analyzed your books, you are ready to move onto the next step.
The next step involves figuring out how many days and weeks of home school you are needing to plan.
To accomplish this, consider these things:
How many holidays will your family take off from home school?
Do your children take off their birthdays?
Are you planning a vacation?
What day of the year are you planning to start home school?
What day of the year are you planning on being done with all of the home school work?
Do you want to plan for a few sick days?
Do you want to plan for a few 'Unexpected Life Moment' days off?
Once you know how many days off you need, then count how many days are in the school year. For instance, if you plan on home schooling Monday - Thursday, then count four days per week for every week between the start and end dates you picked. Once you know how many actual days there are in your home school year, then you can subtract the total number of days off you are planning to take. This will leave you with the total number of school days to plan. Then you will need to take the total number of days and divide by the number of days per week you are planning to home school to find the number of weeks of home school for this school year.
Once you know how many weeks of school to plan, you can make a schedule that will actually work for your family.
The last step is to take each of your books and break them down into daily or weekly assignments. Using the number of pages or the number of chapters, divide the book up and record each section as home school work on either a daily or weekly lesson planner.
A must-have tool for planning your school year is The Full-Year Notebook System. This resource utilizes a series of step-by-step instructions along with worksheets to help you analyze, organize and smoothly implement your home school lesson plans.
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