How Do You Schedule Homeschooling?
Timberdoodle has often heard the question, “How do you schedule homeschooling?” and while many families do it differently, we thought we would share what worked well for our family.
Our philosophy has been that the sooner a child can learn how to learn, the easier homeschooling becomes. (For more on this, see Why Timberdoodle Encourages Independent Learning.) So, in our family, as soon as we could read, we became responsible for completing our own assignments.
Mom started each school year by figuring out how much we needed to accomplish each week to finish that grade level by the end of the school year. So, for example, if a child had five different workbooks that year (math, language arts, thinking skills, etc.), Mom would take each workbook and divide the total pages in that book by the number of weeks we did school, and that was the number of pages that we had to accomplish each week.
Example: Building Thinking Skills has 408 pages divided by 36 weeks of school, which equals 11.3 pages a week. We would round up to 12, giving us a bit of slush room. After doing the math, Mom would make a chart, which we would photocopy and check off each week.
Update: Check out our current online scheduler!
At that point, Mom bowed out of managing our homeschooling, and it became our responsibility to ensure we finished each week’s assignment. If we couldn’t understand something or needed help, we would ask. But other than that, Mom was hands-off.
To help keep the system running smoothly, we had a system of rewards and consequences. For our family, the rule was that schoolwork must be completed by Friday evening. Otherwise, we missed out on Friday family movie night and were sequestered in our bedroom to keep working on the schoolwork. If a child did not complete it all that night, all future fun activities, such as playing or frivolous reading, were also off-limits until the child was caught up.
The same scheduling system works well for younger children, too. The only difference is that you, as the parent, are responsible for helping them complete their list until they are old enough to read it and any instructions in their workbooks.
This method is not limited to workbooks. If you have a science kit you want your child to complete; you could divide up the lessons and assign the number of projects you want to be finished every week. The same thing goes for piano lessons, minutes of practice, etc. Simply decide how much you want done each week, draw up a checklist, and then turn it over to your child.
If you have group activities that you still want to be done together, that is not a problem. Just do it when it’s convenient for your family throughout the day. It does not need to be a part of the child’s assignments since they will not be primarily responsible for that activity. In our family, we wanted to read through Fallacy Detective together as a group. So we added it to our evening reading time when we were all together anyway. Fallacy Detective was completed, and we children were still responsible for most of our schoolwork.
This approach takes most of the homeschooling pressure off of Mom and lets Mom focus on teaching the more specialized topics. Can it get much easier than that?
Precision Schedule Planning
In our family, we never stressed over stop-and-start dates. If we had the flu or took a vacation, schoolwork would pick up where we left off when we returned the following week. This worked particularly well for us since we didn’t take summers off but preferred to sprinkle the free time throughout the year anyway.
My cousin, however, is a different story. She has four young daughters and tracks schoolwork using custom spreadsheets she designed. When she sat down to plan her school year, she researched scheduling and holidays and then shared the information with us. (She’s amazing!) Check out her plan: One Family's Curriculum Planning Approach.