5 Days of Homeschool 101 | Day 2 | Planning

See Day 1

Ahh, today's topic is one of my favorites.  I LOVE to plan!! Following through with the plans - not so much but the planning and organizing process is my favorite.  I plan for our homeschool yearly and weekly.   Yearly Planning
My yearly planning has pretty much stayed the same since we began homeschooling.  The first steps that I have to take are getting out last year's stuff.  I use this simple checklist that I made to keep me on track each year.  You can print a copy for yourself and tweak it to fit you if you like.   Once most of that has been accomplished, I move on to prepare for the upcoming school year.  I'm currently working on that portion now as we type.  I am actually a little behind this year as I have completely moved our school room to a new location.  Since my oldest son graduated and has moved into his own apartment, we can now use his old room for our school room which is such a blessing.  I cannot believe how much stuff I had packed into a little corner of my bedroom which now currently looks so empty!!  I hope to add in a quiet time area and a treadmill in that space one day.   I try my best to get all the copies that I will need made ahead of time and then file them by week.  Since we use My Father's World, I have weekly student sheets that need filing so any additional copies I will file in with those.  I use an accordion file folder to keep the sheets filed by weeks. Here is a yearly planning video.  Again, most of my process has stayed the same even though this is an older video.  The only major differences that I noticed are we now usually work 6 weeks on and take 1 week off unless the week off is close to a planned vacation.

On the week that we take off I try to plan my the majority of my high schoolers lessons for the next six weeks.  Doing that makes it easier for me to complete my weekly planning.  We may not always get to what is on the list but I still like to have an overall plan.

Of course, I made my own planning sheet for that too! Download here to tweak for your own homeschool needs.

Weekly Planning
I've mentioned this so many times before but I cannot post a planning post without giving it a shout out.  This black zipper notebook aka as "my brain" has been in our homeschool since the beginning and is my all time favorite planning tool because I can keep everything I need for the week inside, zip it up and we're ready to go anywhere - home, on the road, park, basketball practice.

If I have done what I needed to during my yearly planning, then my weekly planning should be pretty minimal usually taking no more than an hour to complete.  Usually I can keep it around 30 minutes.    Mainly, I break down the week for each child.  Here is an older video showing a weekly planning session and things pretty much look the same minus one child.  If you have any specific questions, please let me know! Happy Planning!