How I Plan Our Homeschool Days

I've been getting a lot of questions about planning so I thought it'd be worth doing a blog post about it. I rather enjoy planning - that's the span of time all of the creative ideas come together, everything looks pretty on paper and no children have messed up the plan with their attitude or lack of cooperation ;) Ha. 

Now don't get offended - I love teaching and we have so many beautiful educational moments but we also have hard ones and often my best laid plans don't go exactly as they went in my head. 

My planning process is one of a million, there are so many ways to do it and so much depends on personal preference, personality, and family dynamics. That said, I know it can be super helpful to get a peek into someone else's process and take anything that might work for you!

When I taught in the public system full time I was required to meet the outcomes outlined in the Saskatchewan Curriculum. For the most part, topics and content areas were pre-chosen and I had to figure out how to deliver it. This meant I could easily map out my entire year. I created unit plans for each theme (ELA) that included a lesson by lesson break down (right down to the discussion questions to ask at the beginning, middle and end), all handouts ready, all forms of assessment drawn up and ready, all assignments in order, texts lined up, etc. Being that level prepared meant I could spend more after school hours at home rather than in my classroom prepping. 

I started my homeschool planning in the same way. I had Kindergarten alllllll mapped out. And it lasted about a week, a month tops. It just didn't allow for the type of freedom I now had in this new educational set up and I discovered just how much I love chasing down rabbit trails and giving in to my spur of the moment ideas. I like seeing curiosity create a spark and having the freedom to fan that spark into a flame through directing our studies down that path. 

YEAR PLANNING
My year planning is very low key. I start by listing topics we want to deep dive into. This type of study for us is very immersive and will cover all subject areas. This year a few deep dives on our list are:
* Ancient Egypt
* Pirates
* Sharks
* Solar System
We will add to these as I see what sparks their interest through the year. 

I will also list certain skills/projects that I want them to work on. A few examples are:
* Ukulele - get to playing full songs and be able to sing while playing
* Writing Projects: Investigative Journalism (tell the story behind an old family photo and ask good questions *Brave Writer), Opinion piece, Research project: Adobe Spark video, Fiction Piece 3rd Person, Fiction Piece: Diary format, Descriptive Paragraph, Personal Anecdote, Nature Journals
* Build drawing and watercolour skills through art and nature journals
* Grow in reading fluency and comprehension

This is a partial list and I will also add to it throughout the year. These skills can be worked on in various ways. We might use the research project for a type of Shark and the Diary fiction might be slotted into Ancient Egypt and used to tell the story of King Tut. The options are endless. *I'll be doing another post on One Thing Planning at some point but you can also check out my post on Homeschool Rhythms that explains a bit of that process. Actually, I offer workshops on One Thing Planning as well so if you have a homeschool community and need a speaker I'd love to come and help equip and encourage!

Then I'll list a few of the things that kind of run along at their own pace in a linear manner.
* Math - We use Bob Jones University curriculum for math. I only purchase the worktexts as I feel confident to teach any of the math concepts and don't need the teacher guides. My kids also rarely need/want much instruction from me in Math. They get to a new concept, I quickly explain it and they go with it. Math is one of our daily rhythms so we do it each day and they just do the next pages. I also let them choose their next unit when they complete one. We've rarely encountered a problem where they were missing a skill from jumping around the curriculum. On the odd occasion it happens and I just quickly teach it and they continue. 
* Reading Eggs - for the past several years my kids have used Reading Eggs as independent learning time. It's gamefied, fun, well organized. My son finished the program a year or two ago and my daughter is nearing the end. 
* Typing Lessons - A few times a week my kids do typing lessons on Typing.com. Again, it's linear and independent work. 
* Yousician - is an app for learning to play an instrument. It has programs for piano, guitar and ukulele. With the free version you can have 10 minutes of lesson time a day. I like this as a supplement to our Ukulele lessons. 
* Copy Work - we did the whole Handwriting Without Tears cursive program and so 3-4 times a week my kids did cursive practice. The book is set up to move sequentially and required no planning from me. 

So all of that provides a framework for me and sets me up to handle the day to day planning. Day to day planning is something that I find you have the best success in if you keep an open mind, are willing to observe, reflect and make changes that will best suit your kids and family. I find I'm constantly tweaking mine to find the right flow that brings the most productivity and peace to our day. 

When it comes to planning our days I use the custom planner page that I created to outline our day. I'm quite flexible with what we do at what times of the day and often give the kids a fair amount of choice. 
(*the planner page in the shop doesn't have "boy one, girl one" but "morning" and "afternoon" instead :).


We always have a read aloud novel on the go (that most often ties into our deep dive subject) and we do that every day. I also always have a stack of books from the library in the house (that also typically tie into our deep dive) and so we will read picture books each day as well. In our province it is extremely convenient to order any books we want (and search by subject) on the SILS (Saskatchewan Interlibrary Loan System) app. I click the books I want, they send them to my library, I pick up. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

Again, most of our studies revolve around deep dive "One Thing Planning". You can get my One Thing Planning Guide here. 

To boil it down before it gets it's own post, I am essentially creating a map of all the books to read, activities to do, art to create, videos/documentaries to watch, things to write, etc and then I just pull from that map when making up my day to day plan. A lot of the scope and sequence planning is just done in my head (I generally know what will flow well) and then I just take it a day at a time. 

Once we get through a day I will record any "rabbit trails" on the planner page. I'll often make sure we get to those again soon or save them for a larger deep dive. 
I make note of what worked and what didn't.
e.g. "Letting them do math last worked better than I thought. I'll continue to let them choose when they do math."
"Trying to guide them through writing at the same time was stressful and made it hard for them to concentrate. Will split them up next time."

I then take anything we didn't get to or didn't finish and add it to the next day's plan. After that I write down what I want to work on the next day and so on and so forth. 

I am definitely not one who likes a schedule but I do favour rhythms. These rhythms can happen at various points in the day and I don't mind skipping them if we have other stuff going on. This year I may experiment with certain rhythms on certain days. For example, M-W-F Uke lessons, T-TH Typing Lessons, etc. 

I typically do my next day's planning right after we're done school or in the evening (orrrrrr in the morning while we're listening to an audio book lol). It generally takes me 10-15 minutes to plan out the next day. 

If you're just starting out - take heart. You're going to figure out your planning style and rhythm. Give yourself lots of grace. Generally us homeschool moms are excited and overzealous and tend to over plan. It's hard not to want to fit in all the super fun learning opportunities. That said, be aware of creating realistic expectations of your day. Go ahead and over plan but pay attention to when you're all just getting "done". It's O.K. to leave it for the next day. It's also O.K. to scrap the plan and follow the curiosity sparks and rabbit trails. Most often those will be the best learning opportunities. 

To sum up, what has worked really well for me is to create a general outline (hopefully I've given you lots of components to consider) and to collect a variety of resources. For every theme I find a related novel (living book), a stack of library books (non fiction, fiction and picture books), I create a Youtube playlist of relevant videos, earmark any documentaries (on Netflix and Curiosity Stream), and create a list of art activities. 
With this general outline and collection of resources it is simple to pull from it to create our day to day plans. I stay away from planning too many days in advance for my family as it tends to work better if I do it day by day. 

Hopefully this helps and isn't too confusing. It can be hard to articulate when so much of the process just happens in my head.
I love sharing about deep dive "one thing" planning (and like I said have a workshop devoted to this for homeschool conferences and homeschool meet ups). I'd also like to possibly create a video workshop as it's a lot easier to convey through speaking and visuals than in a blog post. Drop me a comment if you'd be interested in a video workshop!