My 3-Step Homeschool Planning Strategy

Planning out your year doesn’t have to be scary or stressful.

Believe it or not, even though I am infamous for planning my classes at the Academy down to the pause-for-laugh in my lecture notes, I am actually pretty relaxed about homeschool planning. The thing that helped me most — that helps me still — is to remember that homeschooling is not like defusing a bomb. You do not have a countdown clock flashing in the background while you desperately try to figure out what wires to cut — you have all the time you need, and if you cut the wrong wire, you may have to fix something, but nothing is actually going to blow up.

So with that in mind, I want to talk about the three strategies that I use to plan my year:

1. I figure out what three things I actually want to accomplish for each kid.

2. I use love it-leave it-need it lists and make my kids keep them, too.

3. I plan as we go.

I think it’s important to have a bigger-picture idea of what you want to accomplish because if you don’t, how do you know if you accomplished anything? I say this a lot, but in homeschooling, you have to make your own metrics for success, and I do this every year with my kids. What do I want my kid to have mastered by the end of 3rd grade, or 5th grade, or 10th grade? I limit my list to three things, which means I’m not focusing on every single individual subject every year — we’ll do every subject, but setting these goals helps me have priorities, which helps when the days and weeks are too short to squeeze everything in and when I am tempted to buy ALL THE CURRICULUM. (And I just want to say, about buying all the curriculum, you never stop wanting to do this — people actually send me free curriculum, pretty frequently, to review, and I am still never satisfied. So just know that the curriculum itch does not go away, you can have stacks of curriculum and still want to keep buying more.) Anyway, my point is, priorities help me know where I want to spend my time and money. I usually have a couple of academic priorities — like, I want my son to write a research paper this year, or I want to work on handwriting or taking notes, or something else. But I might have other kinds of priorities, too — like finding friends, building a community, that might be a goal, and I might spend more time driving around or signing up for activities than I normally would in the pursuit of that particular goal.

I have written and talked about my love it-leave it-need it lists a lot, so I will just recap them here: these lists are just what they sound like. Every month, you take a beat and write down all the things that are working great — it might be a whole curriculum or one project or even something like pushing the start time for your day back an hour. Whatever’s clearly A GOOD THING in your homeschool goes on the list. And you write down the things that aren’t going great — it could be curriculum, but it could also be never finishing your daily to-do list or getting out the door to co-op with everybody’s shoes on (why is that so hard?) — anything that’s clearly NOT working. And you make a list of things that you need, because your child has expressed a sudden interest in marine biology or you realize you need to go back and cover grammar or you want a more structured after-lunch routine since your mornings are creeping closer and closer to lunch time. The trick here is to get your kids to make these lists, too, every month — you have to do it every month because otherwise you forget things that aren’t part of the immediate past. These lists are planning gold, y’all — they tell you so much about your homeschool. You can plan a whole year with nothing but these lists to guide you.

Finally, controversially, I do not plan out my lessons or our schedule in advance. Instead of making a list of what I want to accomplish, I keep lists of what we DID ACCOMPLISH. I write down what we did at the end of each day. This is like the most liberating thing ever, you guys. I pick our books and resources and curriculum, and we do a little each day, as much as we want, and then I write it down. We can speed through things if we want to, or we can spend weeks on one lesson. I cannot overstate how this has revolutionized our homeschool — it may not be for everyone, but the minute I stopped trying to plan in advance, my homeschool relaxed and my homeschool confidence rocketed.

These strategies have seen me from kindergarten through senior year, and while homeschooling sometimes got more complicated, my planning method has stayed fairly simple.

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