4 Easy, Effective Ways to Plan Your Homeschool Year

Whether you’re a new homeschooler not sure how to get started or an experienced homeschooler looking for a little planning inspiration, these simple strategies will help you get organized for the learning year ahead.  

 Have a student-teacher conference.

Include your kids in the planning process. When they are active participants in planning, they take on some responsibility for their own educations and take more pride in their accomplishments. Start an end-of-the-year tradition hanging out together at coffee shop or diner to conduct a post mortem of the school year. Which curriculum did your child like or not like — and why? Which publishers’ texts would he like to use again? What area of study is he most interested in exploring further? If you have multiple kids, try to make time for a separate sit-down with each one. This simple tradition can give you direction and focus when planning the next year. It can be helpful to bring a list of classes and activities to consult during your conversation — it’s easy to forget things that happened back in October after your second mint-chocolate-chip frappe.

Host a planning party.

Invite a few homeschooling friends over for a casual curriculum party. Keep it simple — open a bottle of wine and order in dinner — and ask your guests to bring their favorite curricula from previous years and new material they’re excited about using. These informal get-togethers can be a great way to get inspired and to discover curricula you never knew existed. These planning parties are also a great way to clear some space on your bookcases — keep a giveaway stack of books and materials, and pass on outgrown or not-quite-right materials. This is also a great opportunity to chat about everything from organizing your day to keeping track of lessons to finding the best calculus teacher. The real experts in homeschooling are the parents who do it every day, so you’re much more likely to find a brilliant system from a fellow homeschooler than you are from a generic organization website. If you’re still building your local homeschool community, a planning party can be a great way to get to know other homeschoolers, but you can also get planning support from Facebook groups and online forums. If your homeschool pals are scattered far and wide, consider hosting a Facebook curriculum party instead of an in-person get-together.

Make a love it-need it-hate it list.

Whether it’s your first year homeschooling or your fifteenth, you’re your own best inspiration. Get oriented by making three simple lists. Start with a list of all the things that are going great, whether it’s making Monday baking day, doing narrations with Story of the World, or starting the morning with yoga. You already know that these things work well, so when you’re stuck between two choices, opt for the one that’s closest to something that’s already a perfect fit. Next, make a list of all the things you need to cover in the coming year — maybe it’s time to get serious about multiplication, or your daughter’s dream college requires a lab science for sophomore year. You’ll want to find materials to help you fill these needs. Finally, do yourself a favor and make a list of all the things you just plain haven’t enjoyed, whether it’s your drill-and-drone math curriculum or your way-too-busy Monday schedule. Get rid of the things that aren’t working for you, and fill that space with books and activities you do like.

Set up a DIY homeschool retreat.

Sometimes, you just need a little inspiration before you dive into another year. Book a hotel room for the weekend, and pack your suitcase with some of those books you’ve been dying to read (On our list: Lighting Their Fires: How Parents and Teachers Can Raise Extraordinary Kids in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World by Rafe Esquith, Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid The Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History by James W. Loewen, Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children by Sharifa Oppenheimer, and Pocketful of Pinecones: Nature Study With the Gentle Art of Learning: A Story for Mother Culture by Karen Andreola) and lectures you want to hear (consider Susan Wise Bauer’s Homeschooling the Real (Distractible, Impatient, Argumentative, Unenthusiastic, Non-Book-Loving, Inattentive, Poky, Vague) Child,” The Homeschool Scholar’s A Homeschool Parent’s Guide to Grades, Credits and Transcripts, Pam Sorooshian’s Unschooling and Math, or Donna Simmons’ Talking Pictorially and Living Actively with your Young Child.) Feel free to add your favorite inspiration sources in the comments.

This was originally published in the spring 2014 issue of home/school/life magazine.

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How We Plan Our Homeschool Year in One Coffee Date (With a Little Help from Monthly Note-Making)

My daughter is about to start 11th grade, which means we have been homeschooling for (gulp) nine years. A lot of the credit for navigating that process successfully goes to her—she has been an engaged, interested participant and a totally good sport about pretty much everything. But I also think a planning routine we established early on has helped us achieve our version of homeschooling success.

Not everyone is a planner, and not every homeschool needs a plan — but my inner worrywart could not handle homeschooling without some kind of framework. If you follow the blog, you know that I try to have it both ways: I am an as-we-go homeschooler for the day-to-day (which basically means that instead of trying to predict what we will do each week, I keep track of what we’ve actually done), but I also like to have a big-picture sense of what our year will be like before it starts. (If you’ve used my planner, you know that the beginning is all about setting those bigger goals!) Those bigger goals are the point of our annual coffee/planning meeting.

I’ve talked before about making love-it, hate-it, need-it lists, but they have been such a helpful tool for our homeschool. Every month-ish, we all jot down a list of things that are going great or that we’re really excited about — that’s our love-it list, and it might include anything from a big Minecraft building project (my 10-year-old) to an awesome Japanese tutor to a particular book or subject. I think it’s also important to take stock of the things that just aren’t clicking — a clunky science program, too much writing in history, getting up early for a class at the nature center. The hate-it list is a place to vent, sure, but it’s also a good record of what doesn’t work well for a particular kid or subject, which is useful information for adjusting our schedule now if possible and definitely helpful for future planning. Finally, there’s a need-it list, which for my high schooler includes the classes colleges will be looking for on her transcript. (She isn’t particularly excited about chemistry, for instance, but since her favorite college option right now requires three years of lab science, she’s got Chemistry I on her need-it list.) The need-it list isn’t just about have-tos, though — want-tos go there, too, which makes it a more fun list than it would be without them. More practice writing essays, drama classes, more park days, “messier science experiments,” and Pokemon taxonomy have all featured on need-to lists alongside more prosaic entries like grammar and algebra.

Because we keep monthly records this way, we can chart whether a passion is short-term — geometry featured on my daughter’s hate-it list for a couple of months before she realized that she actually enjoyed it — or persistent. (More outside time shows up on my son’s need-it list every single month — and I swear it’s not because we don’t make his outside time a priority!) It’s also a good reminder of things that we get excited about but then forget — my daughter’s “something with Studio Ghibli” note on her want-to list morphed into one of our all-time favorite high school classes a couple of years later.

I keep my own lists, which are based on my observations and so often look a little different from my kids’ lists. My love-it list emphasizes things that seem to be working well and my kids’ particular strengths; my hate-it list is usually made up of things that cause friction or stress or that just don’t seem to be delivering the way I’d hoped they would. And I keep a kind of master need-it list based around each grade’s major milestones and/or college requirements as well as adding the random interests and ideas that pop up in our learning life. Like the kids’ need-it lists, mine is not a prime directive but a list of suggestions — some things from it will end up in our final plan and some won’t, and that’s fine. It’s just reassuring for me to have that big master list, which I update with specifics every month.

This monthly tracking makes it simple when we sit down over the summer to plan the coming year. We sort through our lists (and sometimes also through previous year’s lists) to see what feels important to consider in figuring out the next year’s plan. It’s usually a mix of some things that are working great that we want to keep going, some things that we cannot wait to see the hind end of, and some things that we’d really like to (or really need to) explore adding to the schedule. We also grab our book lists (which are so long at this point that it’s borderline ridiculous to keep adding books to them because science is really going to have to make some serious breakthroughs if we are going to get through these lists in one lifetime) and go through them together, highlighting titles that connect to things we know we want to study. By the time we get to this point, we’re usually on our second iced coffee drink and a little too excited about everything, but there’s one thing left to do.

The final stage of our planning meeting is taking our plan and figuring out what we need to get from where we are to where we’d like to be over the next 12-ish months. (We are year-round homeschoolers.) Sometimes, we have something that we already love and know we want to continue. (Our awesome Japanese tutor!) Sometimes, we already have an idea in mind of what we want to try for a subject. (Zumdahl chemistry!) Often, we leave with a list of things that need investigating. (How should we organize our feminist literature/history unit? What would make the best spine for AP Language and Composition?) We usually take a few weeks to do a little independent research, then meet back to fill in those last few blanks. From there, it’s easy to strategize our three to five big goals for the year. (That seems to be the sweet spot for us — fewer doesn’t seem like quite enough, and more feels like it stretches the goals too thin.)

I’m realizing that what feels like a one coffee date planning session is actually something that we work on all year — those love it-hate it-need it lists have been one of my favorite homeschool innovations because they really help all of us stay tuned into what we’re doing throughout the year, even as our methods and the specifics of our plans may change. We’re able to figure out our plans with so little stress overall because we’re building them all year long, one month at time — by the time we sit down to actually plan, we’re ready to focus on the fun stuff.

How do you get ready for the upcoming academic year?

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