Planning part one: how I think about the school year

Not super tidy, but it works!

It has taken me a while to work out a system I like for planning for the homeschool year and the daily stuff.  I start with planning out my year.  This is where the public school teacher in me comes out a bit because I still think of my school year as four, nine week periods.  The flexibility of homeschool means, though, that those nine weeks can start anytime, breaks can happen anytime, and the "nine weeks" don't even actually have to be nine weeks long (my last nine weeks isn't!). I have a ten week period to build in flexibility for sick days and days we took off for other reasons (like that the weather was so beautiful that we couldn't stand being inside!).

I start by listing the dates that are important to us: we almost always go to the beach in July and early September, travel for Thanksgiving, take a long break at Christmas, and we take off Ash Wednesday and Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the week after Easter.  We also take time off before Lent sometimes to visit my in-laws or go have an adventure somewhere warm.  On my phone I make a little list of those holiday dates and a guess of the weeks we might be away at other times. 

I use Microsoft Word's calendar template and plug in the information like a title and break times first.  Then I think about a start date.  We usually start the week after our parish's VBS which is the first week of August, but since Covid changed that, we are starting the first week of August. 

This is a strange season in which everything has just been...different.  A spring without playgrounds and visits to the Botanical Garden, but thankfully we still got outside a lot.

A summary of my approach:

1. List important dates

2. Find a free calendar template or just use a real calendar and a pencil

3. Pick a start date

4.  Start counting up weeks.  Play around with things.  Do I want a long Christmas break? Do I want only two weeks of school in December so I can get more holiday magic happening? etc.

Note: We might not take a full week off in reality, for example, when I had planned to if we have a little bit of math to catch up or we are int he middle of something neat and I don't want to lose steam.

5. Make copies and make sure everyone in the family is on the same page. I like to print the calendar and highlight it.  I make a few copies: one to go next to my kitchen family calendar, one for my teacher binder, and now that my oldest boys are getting a little bigger, I like them to have copies, too.  

After I know what our year will look like, I can start to dream about magical days of discovery (insert toddler and preschooler) and then I adjust to come up with a simple, realistic plan of how to do the day.

A few other things I do to help me think about the year:

Our attendance page is very simple.  I like that I write in the date and can see very easily by "ten" how many days we have done.

I keep track of attendance and a "family events" by month because it helps me see physical proof of the work we're doing and the life we're living.  It is a list of anything we have done beyond going to church and doing school work.  I list birthday parties, field trips, errands outside of the normal kind of stuff, anything where we might have learned something, anything where we had fun.  I also try to write down the books we have read aloud and any of the story books we use for the Five in a Row curriculum.  It is fun to look back.  I make notes like "We saw Baby Thomas roll over!" too. 

Our herbs, and a basketball to help with soil ph. *Kidding* Thomas just leaves toys everywhere.

This all helps me when I get into those moods where I ask myself, "Are we doing "enough?" I see that we're traveling and going places and looking for opportunities to learn, and hey when we're stuck at home because of a pandemic, we made the most of it because we did all this stuff we usually don't make a priority (Like Max is helping Jonathan build a bed! I have started an exercise program! We are catching up on crafts I didn't have time for this winter! We tried to grow seeds to start an herb garden, which failed, but then we bought starter herbs so it's all good!)

To make an attendance page, I googled "free attendance page" I think many years ago and then I made a grid and filled in my own information.  You could use a piece of graph or notebook paper, too.

The "Family Events" pages help me to look back and see the good stuff instead of focusing on that nagging question of "Did I do enough????" Under the month I write the books we have read aloud or listened to on Audible.

To make a monthly "family events" page, again, you can literally use notebook paper or you could make a very simple "table" in Word.  I make a folder for each year in Word and then it is very easy to go to documents, update the dates and grades, and "save as" the new year's attendance page and so forth.  The first year you do all of this, then, you will spend the most time. 

When I print all these things, I keep them in a binder which I will post about at another time.