Inside: A simple way to plan your homeschool week
UPDATE: Since publishing this post years ago, I have released my own printable homeschooling planner. You can print the PDF pages as they are designed OR edit and customize them in Canva to make them fully your own. Check it out here:
Sunflower Homeschool Planner | Undated | Digital Download
Make planning simple with our new, undated homeschool planner. With its clean design and carefully curated pages, organizing your thoughts will be a breeze. This is a downloadable product that allows you to either print the pages you want to use, exactly as they were designed OR make edits and customizations to create the perfect planner that fits your needs.
Are you new to homeschooling and wondering how to plan each homeschool week?
Here you’ll find the way that’s working well for me (with a free printable if your brain works the same way mine does)!
How to Plan a Week of Homeschool
FIRST, you’ll need to have your yearly plan set. If you need some help with that, check out this post:
Once you’ve got that settled, follow these 7 steps to plan your homeschool week:
Step 1: DownLoad the Printable
For my homeschool planning sheets, I use this printable.
It organizes our week by subjects, which we’ll talk about more in a minute! The big space allows me to write about our lessons in detail, making it easier for me to know exactly what we’re doing each day.
You can hole-punch your sheets and put them into a small binder to use as a homeschool planner. Then at the end of the year, include copies of your lesson plans into your kids’ portfolios (if that’s something you have to do in your state).
Since the lesson plans are organized by subject, it makes it easy to put them right in with the worksheets, tests, or other assignments and keep everything neat and organized.
If you want to use these, sheets, download your copy by subscribing to my email list here:
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? Head over to the free resource library to download the lesson planning sheets!
Step 2: Check Your Year at a Glance
So once you’ve got your planner situation figured out, it’s time to consult the yearly plan you’ve laid out.
I have mine set up in Google Sheets, where I can easily access it from any device. While I’m making our weekly plan, I pull up our Year at a Glance on my phone and have it sitting next to me where I can refer to it easily.
Step 3: break It Down by Subject
Then I take it one subject at a time. For every week, I fill out 5 sheets: language arts, math, rotating (science, social studies & interest study), special (art, nature, music & library), and Bible.
Those just happen to be the subjects I need for the different slots in our day, but you can customize your plan to fit what you need.
Some of those are done family style, while others are done one-on-one. For the family-style subjects, I simply use the whole block for each day. But since I’m teaching 3 children, for the one-on-one subjects, I split each block into 3 separate sections.
Step 4: Fill in the Basics
Consulting the year-at-a-glance, I then write down which lesson we’ll be doing in each subject each day. I’ve already done the hard part of this during the yearly planning. Now I’m just taking the data from my sheet and writing it into our weekly plan.
Step 5: Consult Your Curriculum
But thorough planning (that truly makes the week smoother) requires a little more than that. So at this point, I open up their books and do a quick look at each lesson we’ll be covering. Then I write down the name of the lesson and a few words describing it.
This also gives me a chance to prepare for step 7.
Step 6: Fill in Their Checklists
I then take a moment to fill out my kids’ checklists for the week. For more on that, check out this post:
Step 7: Take Care of the Extras
When you’re done with everything else, make any other preparations each lesson may need.
Cutting out game cards or an art template.
Gathering extra supplies you don’t have at home.
Making a library run to pick up a suggested book.
Printing a handwriting page or worksheet.
Downloading a song that your kids will need to learn.
You know, all the extras. Make everything as simple as you possibly can for the future Monday-morning-you. She’ll thank you later!
What’s your biggest challenge with homeschool planning? Where’s the most chaos? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time,
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