How to Plan Your Homeschool Year

hi YouTube I am hanging out in my office today because I am going to show you my year at a glance schedule this has come up in a couple videos and I've had several viewers that have asked to kind of see it up close and see my thought process so I'm going to show show that to you today um and I'm going to try and do it in the most logical way that I think that I can knowing that my brain doesn't work like everybody else's I'm going to try and explain this is best I can so this is what my year at a glance looks like this is three pages long this has created an excel and this has my basic outline for the whole year for my first grader I did this last year and then I transpose everything in my lesson plan book and I wrote it down four million times this year this is the main thing that I'm doing and then I write it in his planner so this is what it looks like it has each subject listed and then there's a row for each week that were in school so here in a second I'm actually going to turn my camera around and show you what this looks like on my computer and kind of how I set up my sheet and then what my mental process is while I'm going through and trying to get everything placed I don't know if it's the teacher school teacher in me that wants to see how everything fits or if that's just how my brain has to see it but I really like to have my whole year planned out at least in a general sense and I know that that sometimes can be challenging for people so hopefully this will help you see so this is what my product will look like when it's finished the two things that I need to complete this task would be my school calendar this is the calendar that we have set up for our school year so I kind of know where my breaks are going to be I want this determined before I start laying it out in my year at a glance and then you're going to want to have all of your books so you have access to the table of contents so you can see how many lessons are are how many weeks it's divided up into so I'm going to turn this around to my computer and hopefully kind of walk you through this if you have questions please leave them in the comments and I'll try and get back to you or if you want to see kind of what a blank copy looks like this completed copy is on my blog so you can that out if you want to see what actually all of these little boxes say so we're going to turn around and I'll show you kind of how I go through this whole process okay guys here is my computer screen and I really hope this shows up okay for you to see this is the part of filming I don't like is I want you to be able to see everything that I'm doing so I hope this is okay um what I have to start with is just a kind of a blank document and I'm not going to fill out every week of this but I want you to kind of know what my thought process is as I'm going through so what I've done and if you're not familiar with Excel it's so handy for doing lesson plans and that kind of stuff watch some YouTube videos on it you know kind of figure out how to use it play around with it I love Excel and if you're familiar with it you probably understand why so what I've done is made myself columns so my first column over here is for my week number then I have my dates and then I have each subject that's all the way along the top these aren't really in any specific order but they are in the same order that they're listed in my son's weekly checklist so as I'm filling out his checklist and I'm just kind of going across my row so the first thing I've done is mark off how many weeks of school we have which if I scroll down I have 36 weeks so here's the end of our school here and I've gone through and put in all of the dates for the Monday of that week so I know when that week starts a couple things that you'll notice every once in a while I have this dark thick black line here so on the bottom of week nine you can see I have a thicker black line that's the end of our first quarter it doesn't always work out to be exactly one page and I want it to be as short as possible so I make that little note to myself then you can see here is the end of our second quarter if I scroll down there's the end of our third quarter and then obviously the bottom of the page is the bottom of our school year then anytime you see this heading again when I print this this will be the top so this is the top of page three this is the top of page two and that way I always have that heading there so the first thing I'm going to do just for me to see it visually once I have all of my weeks decided and again I use I'm going to hold this up in front of my screen here I used there it is my calendar and went through and marked off so you can see there on the fifth that's our last week before we have our break so that's why I having this done ahead of time is super helpful because you want to know those dates and not have to be thinking about it while you're trying to do this as well so the first thing I'm going to do is go through and color code my subjects so that I can see them a little bit easier so I've already done that here um Bible is purple all of my language art subjects are in this green shade math is orange because his workbook is orange this year so that made sense to me his science is red and then history is down here in the blue so what I would do it when I'm starting out and I do some of this as I'm looking at curriculum to see how it fits and then for sure once I have it I'm going to go back and make sure the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to pick an easy subject because I want to start getting boxes filled in so for example we use math you see and my son is doing beta this year and math you see is really easy because he does one lesson per week so I'm going to go in here and start writing now you get to see how much I can't type when I'm not looking and put in my lessons this is helpful to have your table of contents for your teacher's guide or whatever it would be handy because you want to know that after lesson seven we aren't going to go on to lesson 8 I made that mistake last year and then we were scrunched for time I need to know that I'm going to put in my unit test for unit 1 um so that's going to give me my space and then I know that then I can go on now to lesson 8 and I'm going to go all the way down my sheet and I'm obviously not going to fill in all of these um because you don't want to watch me fill out my whole schedule again but I am going to just arrow down so that I can show you what I do when I get to the bottom I know that when I map this all out that on week 34 he's going to do the unit 4 test I'm going to give him the whole week to do that it's usually a couple of pages that way he's doing about the same amount per day then if I if he takes the test and he gets it done and I know we need to reteach something we have a little bit of time on the week to do that we're not stressed and then I know that he's going to do the final test on week 35 and then just so I know that this is done for week 36 I'm going to put a little slash through this with a little diagonal border so that I know that there isn't going to be an assignment for week 36 so in my head I know I have at least a week of wiggle room with math if we need it and then I know that that can also be incentive for him to get done early but he'll have that little bit of time off so that's an example of a subject that's super easy that I can real quick go through and list things out so then I would probably go on to another easy one for writing we're using the writing with ease program and again that split in two weeks um so I would just do over here week 1 week 2 week 3 week 4 and so on I'm going to do the same thing with that I'm going to go all the way down to the end except I know that writing with ease is a thirty six week program so this is going to be week 36 so I know that I probably don't want to get behind on writing otherwise we're not going to get done in time to be done for the school year then I might go to something that's a little bit more complicated so let's go up to the top okay the next thing that would be not as complicated but not quite as easy is reading we are using the ordinary parents guide to reading and he has already been working on this see I can't type and talk at the same time so I know that he's going to be working when we start on lessons 158 through 161 that's four lessons so that's one lesson per day and then on the next week he's going to go on to lessons 162 through 165 this is where it gets a little tedious because now in your head you're having to think okay what are my four days for lessons so I would go all the way through until he's done with his book and I know that he's going to finish that book now I know that he'll finish it on week 19 which is right after we come back from our long Christmas break we take three weeks off at Christmas and so he will finish up the last two lessons to 30 and to 31 so that gives me a goal to shoot for that also tells me if he's motivated he could finish up those two lessons in December and then not have to worry about that reading book when he comes back then I'm going to put a note in the next box to start his reading journal which is something that I found online that I think we're going to be using instead of a really set curriculum and so it kind of helps me know where that's going to start so something like reading where you're picking out lesson numbers is going to be a little bit more tedious um let me give you we're just going to go over to your this next column for grammar we're using first language lessons um I know that there are hundred lessons in first language lessons so I divided that by 36 so you can always pull up your calculator if there's 100 lessons we're going to divide that by our 36 weeks of school so we need to do 2.7 lessons per week so for me that means we're going to do three lessons until we run out that gives us that buffer at the end of the year if we have things we need to make up so again I'm going to come in here lessons one through three go to the next box lessons 4 through 6 on down the line so then in my head before my ear starts I know that we are going to finish grammar down here on week 34 so 1 week 34 he's going to do lessons 99 and 100 so then I'm going to do the same thing that I did last time when I finished up with my math I'm going to come over here and give myself a little X through my box so I know that those are done so in my head I know I have those two weeks of buffer and for example one subject that I really kind of chunked up a little bit more is spelling we are using all about spelling level 1 and there are 24 steps in all about spelling and we have 36 weeks of school and as I was looking through the beginning I knew you can do steps 1 2 & 3 concurrently and I knew we could probably handle that so I didn't do spelling the first week of school just gave us a little more time to kind of ease into things so I know then that we are going to do steps 1 & 2 on week 2 so we're going to do step 3 then we're gonna do step 4 then this week to give myself a little bit of time and I'm not sure how it's going to work if we're going to be able to do a step a week or if we're going to end up getting behind and since I have so many breaks I opted to do three weeks of spelling and then take a break so this is going to either be catch up or a break so we'll do three weeks on one week off so then we can kind of get caught up if we need to and then otherwise he gets a break so that I would go on to step 5 then I would go on to step 6 then step seven and then he's going to be able to have that ketchup or break time so that's one that I definitely had to plan out a little bit more so doing this year at a glance it really gave me the chance to see that instead of just trucking through and getting done ten weeks early with spelling I know I can kind of pace myself a little bit not make him rush through it and I know I give myself a little bit of time for leeway um just moving along with handwriting he does two pages so for total it's a front and back every week because he only does handwriting two days a week so I know he's going to do nine through twelve this first week so we would do like nine and ten on Tuesday and eleven and twelve on Thursday and then that is opposite the other reason that it's nice to do this is that I know in his writing assignments month or day one is copy work day two is narration day three is copy work and day fours narration so I know in my head that on days that he does copy work in writing then he doesn't do handwriting that just gives him one less thing to kind of try and get through been on the days that he does narration where he's not writing anything down those are the days that he does his handwriting so this really helps to see so I make sure I'm balancing things so that he doesn't get overwhelmed um just to finish out like I have with handwriting he will actually finish this part of the book um right down here in February he will be done with this book so I'm going to put in here pages 83 through 88 then that finishes up the book and then down here on mine because I'm not exactly sure how it's going to go I put kickstart cursive because we could start that guide or we could just move on to the cursive book for next year and just go ahead and get started on that so I put that in there and so I have that note and I would just go in and fill in the rest by hand when I decide what we're ready to do um let's go back and fill in our first column over here with Bible because this one is pretty simple we are using the grapevine studies okay we are using grapevine studies which I think I just said but my kids were having a moment um so we are going to go through three parts of the Old Testament it's broken up into four Old Testament and for New Testament and they're each 12 weeks long so I know we can get through 36 weeks of that and do all three parts so I'm going to do Old Testament part one which this first lesson then is the timeline then I know we're going to do Old Testament my boxes aren't exactly the right size because normally in my OCD I would so I'm going to take this out put creation but I don't have to retype everything um I would highlight this which is hard to see on my screen and I would make this smaller so that it fit on one line okay um so I would whoops I didn't do that one so smaller because I want it to be as streamlined as possible you don't have to do that if you don't feel like being obsessive about it but I did so I would go all the way down and then I know when we get down to the 24th we're going to be starting Old Testament part two and then I would go through and fill in my my topics from there same thing um kind of with science is a little bit similar we are using the God's design for life series and we're going through plants animals and the human body so what I did then is I started each box with so like this one is going to be on plants so I always know which book I'm working in and then I know this week we're going to do lessons one through four and then this next one we're doing plants again and then we're doing lessons five through seven this one I actually sat down with my books and kind of looked to see where there was a good break if there was a unit that was only three lessons long then that's all we did that week if there was a unit that was for lessons long then we did four in a week if there was a five then I kind of split him up a little bit so I really went through and tried to figure out where there were some good stopping points so we don't do science necessarily every day but we have done it most days to try and get through all of the lessons there are in that book I want to say there's 36 lessons in each book so you have to do to get through all three in a year you have to do obviously almost one a day um then the last one I have over there is history and history again is a little bit tricky because we are doing the Diana wearing history revealed series and you spend four weeks each unit so the first week we started unit one which was creation and the flood can't spell flood um and so for me it's easy because I'm just going to copy and paste down here for four weeks then when I do my specific plans on my son's weekly checklist then I'm going to look at it and decide week one is a lot of reading week two is timeline and looking at different interesting facts and peoples and places so they go through different learning styles each week so I'm going to separate those out when I'm doing his actual weekly checklist but that way I can see where everything falls um so this is really long but I hope it's helpful for you this is just kind of the thought process that I go through so I sit down I don't do all of this at once because I would probably get really burned out I would probably do like I said pick an easy couple of subjects and start to get your sheet filled out I'm going to switch over to my full this is my mind that's done so you can kind of see how it ends up looking so I would pick you know do my math first because that one's easy to writing first and once you start to see where all the pieces fit then you can start to take some of those trickier ones like the spelling or the handwriting and figure out where you're going to have gaps or where you're going to have breaks and start piecing them in this is not detailed I'm not writing down like read this book read this activity listen to this CD it's just week one week two week three lesson seven through nine lessons 10 through 12 I can on a weekly basis go in and add more detail when I need to but right now I can look at my whole year on three pieces of paper and see you know kind of how things are going to fit where we might need to make adjustments so I really hope that this is helpful for some of you and it's not just my brain that thinks this way but again if you have questions please leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them there is a copy of this completed sheet on my blog if you would like just a blank one with this template I can take the weeks out and stuff and take the topics if you just want to have something that you can start to write stuff on I know some people really like to just handwrite it out I'd be happy to just throw a blank one up there too so let me know if that's something that you want so thanks for sticking with me thanks for watching I really appreciate it it's been really fun to be behind the scenes or in front of the camera a little bit and make these videos for you guys and I really hope that you enjoy them don't forget to Like and subscribe and happy homeschooling

Channel: Megan Phillips

Views: 48,404

Rating: 4.9356222 out of 5

Keywords: how to, how to plan, homeschool, home school, homeschool plan, home school plan, homeschool planner, home school planner, year at a glance, year-at-a-glance, homeschool year, home school year, how to plan homeschool, how to plan home school, homeschool overview, home school overview, plan, planner, how to homeschool

Id: 0-JtBNCIm_Q

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2016