Need a little inspiration to get started (or keep going!) with your homeschool planning? This podcast is full of ideas to make it efficient, easy, and enjoyable!
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USE CODE: 2024HSPLAN for 20% off
(ends 8/1/24)
Resources mentioned:
- Creating a Homeschool Schedule You Love eCourse – use code: 2024HSPLAN for 20% off! (ends 8/1/24)
- Flexible Homeschool Planning (book)
- Tapestry of Grace page
- Music in Our Homeschool
- You ARE an Artist (chalk art lessons)
- Independent Homeschooling (post)
- Modified Workboxes (post)
- Homeschooling & the 3 Year Learning Curve (post)
- How Many Hours Does It Take to Homeschool (post)
- Delight Directed Homeschooling series
- Investing in Real World Homeschooling (post)
- CompuScholar
- Homeschool Graduation Requirements – A Simple Plan (post)
- Preparing Your Homeschooler for College (post)
- Homeschool to College – Transitioning your teen (podcast #102)
TRANSCRIPT
I was talking with a friend this past week about homeschool planning. She’s getting ready to start her new school year. She starts a little earlier than a lot of us do, and she was saying how she just did not feel inspired this year. She was really struggling with how to even get the plan put together. She was doing what she always did, but she just didn’t feel like it was going to necessarily work as well this year. And it got me thinking about the fact that probably a lot of us feel like that from year to year. There’s just certain years where homeschool planning does not feel like something we want to do. And so in this podcast episode, I want to share with you some homeschool planning inspiration that will hopefully help kickstart you and get you ready to move into this next school year.
During this podcast, I want you to just grab a pen and paper, a cup of coffee or tea, and get yourself in that planning mode as you listen to these tips and tricks and ideas for planning your homeschool year!
Hello friends! Welcome to the Raising Arrows® podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from RaisingArrows.net and this is Episode #168: Homeschool Planning Inspiration. In this episode, we are going to be talking about some products that I have that could help you, some posts that I have that can help you, some resources, tips, and techniques that I have used over the years to help you get inspiration for planning your homeschool year and doing it in a way that is flexible and doable and helpful to your family and not something that tries to smush you into a box that everybody else is trying to fit into because God created your family unique and special and you guys have a different mission from everybody else, and so your homeschool planning reflects that mission. And so I hopefully will give you some tips here that give you the inspiration to move forward this school year with a plan that really works for you.
So I’m going to start by telling you about a product that I have that I think would be incredibly helpful to start with, and that is the Creating a Homeschool Schedule You Love ecourse. Because the starting place for our homeschool planning is our schedule.
In my Creating a Homeschool Schedule You Love course, I walk you through the things that you need to know in order to create a homeschool schedule that works with the rhythm and routine of your life, how to set up a solid Morning Time, how to put things on independent autopilot so that they just loop around and around and you don’t have a lot of decision fatigue. I also help you to understand what time works for you to homeschool and how long you need to home homeschool. It is a very meaty course that you have lifetime access to and you can find that on my website at RaisingArrows.net/store. I will also be linking this in the description so that you can go to it, you can look it over, and you can decide for yourself if this is a good place for you to start. Because if you are feeling like you don’t have a lot of inspiration for your homeschool planning right now, it might be because you have to change your schedule. You know that you have to change your schedule and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by that to the point that you can’t even get the homeschool planning off the ground. So if it is a schedule thing, definitely look into my course. I also talk in there a lot about choosing curriculum and loop schedules. And like I said, Morning Time, autopilot independent homeschooling, all kinds of things to help you put together a schedule that works for you rather than against you.
And if you use the code 2024HSPlAN, that’s 2024HSPLAN, all in caps, you get 20% off until August 1 on that particular course. It would definitely be worth it for you to check it out, dive into it, and put together a schedule that really, really works for you.
Now, the next resource I want to talk to you about is my book, Flexible Homeschool Planning. This is how I have been planning our homeschool for years, and I’m going to be sharing some of those tips and techniques in this podcast today because I really feel like that is a good way for you to put together a plan. It’s definitely a good way to do a flexible plan, one that you might need this coming year if you are having kind of a different year than you’re used to.
In this book, I talk about why you might need a homeschool plan, why you shouldn’t stress about homeschool planning, the tools you need to do a quick homeschool planning, how to keep it flexible, where to put everything, and the way that you can do this so that you don’t continue to stress all throughout the year over your homeschool plan.
The first thing I would encourage you to do when it comes to planning is to figure out which subjects you want to do together with your whole group of kids and which subjects you know they need to do independently.
Typically, your independent subjects need to be those that are age-graded, the ones like math where it’s 6th grade, 7th grade, Algebra, and on up. Those are age-graded subjects where there is no way around it. You can’t do little kid math with your big kids. It’s just not going to work. You can’t do that all together.
However, there are a lot of subjects that you can do together. In fact, you can do history, geography, fine arts. You can even do science altogether until a certain age. There is so much that can be done together that then you can more pick and choose as to what you want to work on together to spend your time and what you want to assign individually, and that be their responsibility. And they create a workflow, which I talk about in this book, Flexible Homeschool Planning. They create a workflow of their own. You create a workflow that goes into the morning time category, and together you build a plan that gets all of the subjects done.
You do not have to do all of the subjects that you can do together together. So, for instance, I don’t do science together. Could I? Yes, but I don’t because I want to focus more on the history and geography and fine arts and Bible and our read aloud. That’s where I want my time to be spent. I want them to own the science on their own.
So they have an independent school list that is kind of on a block schedule, especially for my older kids. They do the same things every single day, most of the kids. And then when they get older, they have like Monday, Wednesday will be their computer stuff and Tuesday, Thursday will be their instruments. And so we kind of separate back and forth like that because as they get older, it takes more time to get their work done.
I also get to the place where I only want them to block an hour for math because otherwise, at the age that they are now, the math could take 2-3 hours if they tried to do an entire lesson. I don’t want them doing that, so they only do an hour.
But when it comes to planning, I know what I want to put into that morning time slot, that all together slot, and I put those things in there and I just work through them. And the beauty of Flexible Homeschool Planning is that you put it all down on a notebook paper. I keep a notebook where I write down lots of different things based on topics. So the history curriculum that we use is Tapestry of Grace, and there are sections in each of those that are based around a topic.
So recently, we did ancient China, and then we moved into to ancient India and ancient Americas. Those would each be their own sheet of paper. And in that, when I was looking through for ideas or I was looking through YouTube for videos to go along with the topic, I would write those down in different places throughout the notebook paper, kind of sectioning them off. Like over here, down on the right hand side of my notebook paper, I would put videos that we’re going to watch. And up at the top of the page, I’ll have the reading resources that I’m going to read aloud to them. Off to the side, I will have their individual literature assignments and so on and so forth. All the different things I want to do, the geography, the fine arts, everything that goes along with that particular program.
And you can do this for unit studies, you can do this for a particular curriculum that you have. Try to figure out what you want to base your homeschool on. History is a very easy one to base your homeschool on because it is really awesome to go chronologically from creation all the way to modern day. And you can always pull extra things from there.
Music in Our Homeschool – they have music that goes along with the different time periods.
You ARE An Artist, that is a chalk art program, and they have a lot of different historical chalk art lessons that you can do.
You have YouTube videos you can pull in. You can do different reading assignments. You can gather all different age levels of reading books and pass those out to your kids. So if you choose a particular curriculum to kind of build from, that makes it a little bit easier.
Maybe you want to build from a Bible curriculum that you really wanted to try, and it’s pretty meaty. Start there. Put those things down on notebook paper in what you think would be units, something that would maybe last a week or two. You put it all down on the notebook paper. As you do the different pieces of that curriculum, the different things that you’ve written down on the notebook paper, you mark them off, and you can jump around if you need to. You can add things in if you need to. You’re not beholden to a calendar. You’re not beholden to a set of lessons that, maybe something happens and you don’t get to all of it. You’re only beholden to a notebook, a notebook that you wrote the stuff in, and you get to choose a when you do it. That’s what keeps it super flexible. You never feel behind, you never feel like you didn’t get enough accomplished, because it’s all there for you the next time you sit back down and do morning time.
Okay, so hopefully you kind of get an idea of how we do morning time and how I do my planning for that morning time. Another way that you can do it is through a Loop Schedule. This also works for the independent school time, but I’m going to start with that together time. That you may be having.
A loop schedule, which I talk about extensively in my scheduling class, is where you write down the individual subjects. Now, you probably need a separate notebook where you’re writing down the different things you want to study for those subjects. So the different books that you want to have on hand, the videos you want to watch, you’re still going to need to kind of keep track of those things. But what you do instead of just kind of randomly choosing throughout the day the things that you want to do from your notebook paper,you’re going through the subjects in an order. So you’re just starting at the top with history, geography, music, art, and so on and so forth. Anything that you do altogether, and you’ll do two, three of those a day during morning time And you’ll just move down the list and loop back up to the top – thus the reason it’s called a loop schedule.
The only thing you have to do there is make sure that you know what the next resource is going to be. So if you’re doing history, what’s the resource that you’re using? Well, it’s going to be whatever chapter you’re reading, whatever video you’re watching. You’re going to do that during the history time, and then you’re going to put a hold on that and go to the next thing and you’re going to work your way down. And when you come back up there to history, you’re either going to be in the next chapter in the book that you’re reading or you’re going to be on the next video, or you’re going to be in a different resource, a different timeframe, whatever it is. You do need to know what resources you’ll be using. But that gives you a logical, almost autopilot, order because you get used to the order that you’re doing the subjects in. So your homeschool planning in that process is really just figuring out the various resources that you need and then keeping those on hand as you need them.
Now, what about independent school time? This is a great place to start giving your children responsibility and teaching them a workflow. So you show them an order to their subjects. Perhaps you want them to start with math and then do science and then do their literature and then do their typing and so on and so forth. You create an order of operations for them and they start doing it.
Now, if there’s kinks in the road, you help them figure out how to change things up so that it works. Perhaps you’ve got two kids needing a computer at the same time. Obviously, that’s not going to work. We need to move the different subjects around so that it makes more sense. But it gives them an order, a workflow, a way to do their subjects on their own. And they don’t need to have a lot of extra guidance in this. It’s really do the next thing over and over and over. Do the next lesson in math, do the next lesson in science, do the next lesson in whatever it is. It’s not difficult. You don’t need to stress over it, you don’t need to separate it all out into individual lessons. It’s do the next thing.
Years ago, workboxes were an incredible resource that everybody was running to at the time, and it seemed like a great idea, but when I tried to implement it, I ended up having to modify it greatly because what a lot of workbox proponents wanted you to do was at the beginning of the school year, they wanted you to take all of the worksheets out of the workbook. So you would have a workbook, you’d be taking all of the sheets out of it and putting them into individual weeks of the year for each child. I couldn’t do that. That was way, way, way too much work. And then if there was any sort of hiccup along the road, I actually added to my workload rather than making it more convenient for myself.
Your homeschool planning needs to be convenient. It needs to be flexible. It needs to be easy, simple, not so complicated and difficult that you’re not going to be able to implement it and you’re not going to be able to complete it or continue with it. Keep it simple.
So instead of taking every single worksheet out of a book, putting it into an individual file folder or box or whatever it is, or even if you were just doing it at the beginning of each day (which was also overwhelming for me, especially when I was having baby after baby and my mornings were full of nursing babies) there was no way I was going to be able to get up before everybody and get all of their worksheets and all of their stuff that they needed to have done into their individual boxes even once a week. It was just too much for me.
Instead of that, keep it all together in the workbook and do the next lesson. Now what we do is my 7 year old has her math workbook. I mark off the ones that she needs to do or doesn’t need to do. I just put a big x through some of the problems and I can do that ahead of time if I want to or she just does the whole thing. But I know that all she needs to do is the next lesson. Same with all my other kids. They just read the next section. They just do the next lesson. It’s not that complicated, so don’t make it overly complicated.
You don’t necessarily need to assign a certain number of pages. Tell them like in their science book, read two pages a day, read one section a day, read one chapter a day, do one lesson a day. That’s all you need.
And then what that creates is that workflow that just naturally happens. There’s no questions about what’s next. It’s already laid out for you. You don’t need to overthink it and over complicate it.
Okay, another issue that happens when we’re talking about homeschool planning is that you may be trying to fit a whole bunch of things into your day, a whole bunch of subjects. You know that you want to do this science and this fine arts and this Bible curriculum and on and on and on. You’re trying to come up with all these things to cram into the day. The problem is they are going to end up crammed and everybody’s going to be way too busy and you’re not going to enjoy the journey at all. Do not do that to yourself, please.
You need to maybe back off and figure out which of these subjects that I’m wanting to do, could I do in a rotation? Sort of like a loop schedule on a really grand scale. A monthly loop schedule, a quarterly loop schedule, a six month loop schedule. We do this subject for this amount of time, and then we switch to another one.
Fine arts is a great example of this. Maybe you want to do some sort of music appreciation class and an art appreciation class. And then maybe you want to do some nature walks and nature journaling. Those are three things that you don’t necessarily need to put all together into one homeschool plan. You can separate them out. Do the fine arts music for three months or four months. Do the art, a really intensive art for four months. Then do in the fall, do a nice nature journaling, nature walk, or maybe it’s the spring.
Focus your energy on individual subjects that are like that, that don’t have to be sequentially done over and over and over again. Like math, you know, obviously you’re not going to necessarily do four months of math and then quit for a year. But fine arts, music, the art, the nature walks, those kinds of things, you can definitely hold on those.
So think about what are some of the subjects that you’re wanting to do, but you’re maybe cramming your life too full and you need to do those in snippets instead of doing them all the time. It just may be too much. Foreign language is another one. You don’t need to do foreign language all year long. You can do six months at a time and then come back to it six months later and put some other class.
Think of this like college or semesters at a public high school where you’re doing certain classes for certain semesters, and then you switch to new classes. And you really get to focus in then on four or five classes rather than 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 classes that you can’t really ever do justice to because you’re just going an inch deep and a mile wide on everything. You want to give more time and energy to those individually. Do not cram your schedule so full. That is the lesson here is don’t cram it full. Your homeschool planning efforts will be much more rewarded if you back off and simplify and slow down with things and then take things out. Put something else in periodically.
Okay, now I want to talk briefly about some special circumstances, some things like being new to homeschooling or homeschooling high schoolers that may change how you do your homeschool planning.
First of all, if you are new to homeschooling, welcome. It’s not as hard as it feels, but it is as exciting as it feels. But there will come a point where that excitement kind of wanes and you need to be ready to dig in and refresh.
The first thing I want to say is it usually takes about 3 years to kind of get your groove. I have a post all about this called the Three Year Learning Curve, (I will have that linked in the description) because it does take about three years and you’re going to feel like you’ve wasted time and money and really you haven’t. You’ve learned a lot about yourself and about your children and it’s really just part of that process.
Secondly, homeschooling does not take as long as public schooling does. It just doesn’t. You are much more intensive, much more focused. There’s not a lot of extra that has to be done there’s no lining up in lines, going to the water fountain, going to the cafeteria, going out for recess, changing rooms, dealing with a lot of discipline. Sure, there’s going to be some discipline issues from time to time, but not like you would have in a regular classroom. So it does not take as long to homeschool. So you may be surprised if you have a kindergartner, you are probably going to be done with the seat work of homeschooling within 30 minutes. I do have a post on How Many Hours It Takes to Homeschool that goes age by age and kind of gives you an idea of about how long you ought to be spending homeschooling.
Another thing I would encourage you to incorporate into your homeschool planning ideas, just kind of as something in the back of your head as you are planning, is to add in some of those passions, those delights that your children have.
I did a whole series of posts years ago on delight directed homeschooling, where you implement and infuse a lot of that into your child’s lessons so that they are doing the things that they love while they are learning about the things that you want them to learn about. For instance, if you have a budding photographer or a budding artist, they should have more opportunities within the lesson plans to take photos, to do art, and you should find ways to incorporate that into their lesson plans if you can.
I also have a post about investing in real world educational opportunities, and this is something that I think is huge. If you have a child who is interested in coding, graphic design, anything techie, start to invest in those. Start saving back money so that you can invest in some of those interests.
Now, it may not come to fruition as adults, but it is very good to put some money aside for those interests and to encourage those and see where it goes. It may blossom and bloom like it did with our oldest child. He now has a remote job that is in the tech industry. And so it’s something that is very important that you pay attention to your individual children’s aptitudes and giftings, and then put some money aside and add those to your lessons if you can.
So, for instance, currently, right now, I have a couple of boys who are 13 and 15 who are doing some CompuScholar classes, and they are doing some web design. Earlier they did some coding. We actually sent the 13 year old and 11 year old to a robotics camp recently. And so we’re just trying to find those opportunities and those ways to invest in real world, applicable subjects that they need in the future or that may be something that they end up doing in the future.
Okay, and then finally homeschooling a high schooler. If you are homeschooling a high schooler this year for the very first, kudos! Take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay. I have graduated 4 so far. We’ve survived. It is a different world and it can be very scary, but it doesn’t have to overwhelm you and stress you out.
The first thing I would tell you to do is take a look at my post on homeschool graduation requirements – a simple plan. Basically, what that post talks about doing is going to your state’s website, looking up the graduation requirements for that current year, and basing your homeschool plan for the next four years off of those requirements.
Now that said, you definitely can add to it or take away from it. You typically have that flexibility as a homeschool parent. Now, depending on your state’s laws, you may need to stay very rigid with that, but definitely start there. It gives you a place to begin and then you can move forward with with a 4 year plan that kind of roughly is in your head and you can start blocking in exactly what subjects you need to do each year.
I would also encourage you to realize that you can move subjects around. If you did something in 8th grade and it is high school level work, you can move that into a high school transcript. It does not mean that you have to do it all over again or that you don’t even get to count that because it was in 8th grade. It is just as if a child in the public school system were going into an advanced class or they were going to the high school for certain classes and then going back to their junior high classes. It happens. Especially with an IEP, it happens. And so it is okay to take those junior high classes that were high school level and put them on the transcript. It is perfectly acceptable.
So don’t stress out so much about having a high schooler. They’re a lot of fun and you can put together a really great plan for them that incorporates a lot of different things. Our english composition is based off of the historical literature that we are doing for history. They go one in the same. And that is the beauty of homeschooling is that you can interlink all those different classes and you can manage to get several different subjects out of what most people would see as one class.
History, again, fine example. You’re gonna really quickly realize here that I am a history nut. I love this stuff. Hated it in high school and junior high. Love it now. But it was boring and dry, a bunch of dates and all of that. It wasn’t until I took a history class, it was a British history class in college that I realized history was awesome. And it was the professor, it was his passion for it, and he taught it as if these people were real. Hmmm…Guess what? They are! And it made it come alive. And so I am very passionate about history, and I feel like everything can be linked to history. But in that chain of thought, if you take history, you have your literature, you have your history there. You might be doing surveys of different parts of history where you’re really diving deep. Those can be individual classes, especially if you really make them robust. A survey of such and such time period counts as an elective. We, in fact, gave our oldest son a Survey of World War II History elective because he did so much work with learning about World War II, putting together all kinds of information. He did a fantastic job with it. He even wrote a unique study as part of his class. And so we gave him that elective. So there again is a chance for you to really dive deep into your children’s passions and use those electives to do so.
Another post I’d encourage you to read is Preparing Your Homeschooler for College Even if They Don’t Go. I also have a podcast about Transitioning Your Teens, and this one is more about the culture and the world at large. And it’s just a really important podcast to listen to if you have teenagers. Because we want to shelter, shelter, shelter, but there comes a point where we have to start opening the doors and allowing them to see the culture at large, and allowing them to harden themselves in a way where they’re building from Scripture, but they’re also recognizing the culture at large and how it operates. And so that is an incredibly important podcast.
And then finally, I would encourage you to take a look at my post on independent homeschooling. This is for everybody, not just high schoolers. We start teaching our kids how to work independently from the get go. And in that post, I explain the process that we use. Exactly how we teach them, and then how we step away and allow them to try themselves. It is a very, very good post that explains that all to you and can really help you to get to a place where you’re not doing all the work all the time.
We are about to the end of this podcast. We have gone quite long on this because it’s one of those topics that you really kind of have to hash from all sides. One thing that I would tell you that may be the key to all of this, besides the keeping it simple, it’s definitely a key. If you are super familiar with your curriculum, like I am with tapestry of grace. We’ve been using it for years and years. I know exactly how it works. I know exactly what I need to do. And when I get to homeschool planning, it’s pretty simple for me to dive in and do a little bit at a time and know exactly where I’m at.
As you get familiar with the curriculum that you’re currently using, you will be able to homeschool plan like that. It will not be difficult for you at all because you’re used to it. It’s that learning curve that happens at the beginning of a new curriculum, the beginning of a new school year, where you’re a little rusty, you’re a little out of practice, you maybe aren’t familiar with the curriculum at all, and you’ve got to get into that groove. That is where you have to give yourself grace. Once you get to the point where you are familiar with it, you know it inside and out, you know exactly how things work. You know what works best for your school day concerning that curriculum, you will find it easier and easier to plan.
And that is one reason why I don’t advocate planning an entire year at a time. You haven’t had time to get familiar with that curriculum unless you used it the year before. And even then, you also haven’t had time to figure out what your life is going to be like. 12 months, 9 months, whatever it is, changes a lot.
I do not like to box myself in. I feel like you very easily lose sight of the goal and the mission when you box yourself into trying to plan an entire year at a time. So I would encourage you to give yourself grace while you get used to the curriculum and used to the new school year. Start slow, start easy, then build up, get more familiar with the curriculum, start making your lesson plans, maybe a few weeks at a time, and then move from there. I really think that you will find that the homeschool planning gets easier and easier the more grace you give yourself and the more time you give yourself.
Alright friends, I hope that this has been super inspiring for you as you plan your next homeschool year. As always, Raising Arrows® is your place for large family homemaking and homeschooling. If you have questions or things you’d like me to address on this podcast, you can always find me amy@raisingarrows.net. I answer all my own email and so you can drop me a line there and I will definitely be happy to chat with you and possibly come up with a new podcast based on your question. Thank you so much for joining me here and we will see you next time.
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