Skip to Content

Planning Your Homeschool Year

Planning out your homeschool year can sound and seem very daunting.  On one hand, planning for a full year at a time can backfire, what happens if the curriculum you choose isn’t working for your family, or isn’t enough. But on the other hand, you don’t have to worry about not being ready and getting overwhelmed.

Planning Your Homeschool Year

*This post contains affiliate links, see my disclosure policy for more information.*

How to Plan a Homeschool Year

These past years have been simple, with our curriculum all planned out for us using an all-in-one curriculum. But then you don’t have full control over the whole of your year.

The first step is to decide on which subjects you have to teach according to the law in your province (or state, or country), and then add in the subjects you want to teach or that your children want to learn.

In Canada, we have to teach math, language arts, social studies, and science at the elementary grade levels. My kids are super interested in cooking and baking so we include weekly cooking lessons for them, and I want to get them and myself learning French this year.

There are many planners to choose from to do your planning. I use a notebook to get my thoughts and a rough draft of what I want to get done before writing it in my Happy Planner. I know a lot of people like bullet journals for their planning as well, I have not tried, I like the structure of my Happy Planner.

Homeschool Curriculum

Take some time to look over your past year to see what curriculum worked, and decide if that is what you want to use again. I know BookShark worked for us, so we’ll be using it again.

The best part about having used BookShark is that they have done all the heavy lifting for you and have the year planned out already, 36 weeks of lessons planned out for science, history, and language arts including copy work, and spelling.

Thinking about Elementary Curriculum Choices for Your Family

Homeschooling Multiple Ages

Which subjects are you hoping to teach your children together at the same time? It is totally possible to teach your children together about a number of subjects.

We do science and history together. These subjects are how we start each school day together, kind of like a morning basket. We read from our history read-aloud book of the day, then move over to our science books and worksheets.

This takes us from the couch to the dining room table where we do our work. From there we can go into individual subjects such as math.

Break the Subjects Down

How many weeks are you going to be doing lessons? Perhaps 36 weeks.
How many lessons are in your math subject? Teaching Textbooks Level 5 has 130 (lessons & quizzes)

Divide it by the number of weeks, then divide it by the number of days per week you will be doing lessons. We do 4 days currently.

How many math lessons will you be doing each week? Do the same for your other subjects such as language arts and reading. This is the simplest way I know to make sure you don’t run out of time to get lessons done, and you aren’t panicking too much.

Planning Your Homeschool Year Breaking Down Subjects

Scheduling Lesson Time

Are your kids involved in extracurricular activities that you need to plan around? Or perhaps you work. BookShark curriculum is scheduled for doing school four days a week letting you have a free day for extracurricular or lazy days. You can use your fifth day whichever day of the week works best for your family’s schedule. These will be cooking days for our family.

Don’t stress yourself out completely over planning your homeschool year. You do not need to plan for the year. I am a planner, I need to know where we stand on getting our curriculum finished and all that stuff, so having at least a rough idea for the year is important for me.

Similar posts that you my be interested in:

Organized Homeschool Lesson Planning

Homeschool Planet – Online Homeschool Planner

Planning a Road Trip with Your Kids