Planning

One of the changes I have made in the last 2 years is more planning for our homeschool year. I always wanted to be a fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal but that simply does not work well for our family. We tried doing the boxed curriculum where you just do x number of pages in each subject each day but that did not work well at all for us. So I embraced the planner.

First I do an overview of an entire year. I use the method described in the following video to map out our homeschooling year:



On this page I put all the info for birthdays and holidays plus field trips or any vacations we might take during the year. It also helps me to plan out breaks too.

I get my other planning pages from Donna Young. I gather up the curriculum I plan to do for that year and just write out some goals. Some science and history we use over 2 years. I typically plan 2 weeks out at a time. I use one of the weekly planners from Donna Young. I have bought planners but none have really suited our needs and I just end up not using it. This is all still a work in progress. Starting next semester I plan to do at least 3 weeks at a time so that I am looking forward to what books we might need to check out from the library. It also gives me more time to get a suitable substitute for books that do not work for us.