Welcome to another blog series here on Our Cooper Nest! I thought a blog series on my planning process would be better so that I could share with you in a little more detail than that of Instagram stories or a short-caption post. After announcing this idea on my social media, it was made known to me that a blog series is also your preferred way of seeing my detailed planning content.
April 2024 – Update to add: Find all the parts of the Yearly Homeschool Planning Series below:
Part 2- Subject Lists and Subject Scheduling
Part 3- Curriculum, And My Hunt For Living Books
Part 3.5- How I Plan Our Charlotte Mason History Lessons
Part 4- Lesson Planning And Timetables
Our Charlotte Mason Curriculum Plans For 2024-2025: Year 4 and Year 1
So grab a cup of your favorite drink and enjoy this blog series!
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In this blog series, I will be sharing my process of planning out our 2024-2025 homeschool year. This series will take a few months to complete while I write these articles in real-time as I’m planning so that I can get into as much detail as possible. I hope this series gives you ideas and tips for your own homeschool planning, and that you’ll keep coming back to read more as we move along in the series! As always, I’m happy to further answer questions in the comments!
First Things First
For reference, my oldest will be in 4th grade, and my youngest will start 1st grade.
Our state’s homeschool laws are very relaxed with little to no regulation on how or what we use for lessons, at this time. Regulations and laws vary from state to state, so you can find out what those are specific to you on the HSLDA website here.
For our previous homeschool year plans, read more here. At the end of this series, I will share our conclusive 2024-2025 curriculum plans for 1st and 4th grade in a blog article or two with all the resources linked.
Yearly Planning – Why?
We are considered year-round homeschoolers, meaning that we really don’t take off a single chunk of time from lessons other than a few weeks for Christmas time, and a few weeks in the summer right after we wrap up our year. Even during our breaks, we are still reading books, and doing math drills here and there.
Why I plan months in advance:
- I don’t want to feel rushed in making curriculum decisions
- I will have more time to research, find books, and purchase curriculum than all at once, possibly hitting more than one sale for the resources needed
- I like to have a real Summer Break for myself, spending time with family more presently, as well as complete any homeschool workshops, catch up on any reading, and actually rest from the work of homeschool (it truly is good, but takes diligent work)
When I begin planning for a new homeschool year:
We typically begin our homeschool year in July, so after the holidays have settled down, I start outlining plans for a new homeschool year by mid-January and aim to be finished planning our entire year by the beginning of June. We might still be waiting for books and resources to trickle in through the mail, but the bulk of my planning is done by this time.
Where to even start?
At the beginning of our homeschool journey, it took a couple of years to get a handle on the process of planning for a new year. Eventually, and especially as I became settled in some of our curriculum decisions, the task of planning a year out got a lot easier. Now, with some experience and my tried and true methods and processes, homeschool planning, whether for the entire year, by terms, weekly, or daily is one of my favorite parts of homeschooling!
The Homeschool Curriculum Planner is my main go-to tool for planning our year. Over time this planner went from ideas and planning processes of mine on blank paper to a curated and intentionally designed printable planner now available to anyone wanting to use it.
Even if you don’t actually ever “like” the planning phases of homeschooling, we all have to do it, and so that’s why I created this planner with the intent to help anyone along the way in their planning.
Creating Our Year In A Glance
After I’ve printed my copy of the Homeschool Curriculum Planner I will also print off the dated Year In A Glance printables (also found in my shop, offered as free planning printables). With these pages, I begin to think through our start date, end date, and important break weeks I want to include in the year.
I prefer to go over this part of my planning with my husband so that we can work together to pick the best break weeks for our family to get the most out of planning trips and possibly time off his work to join us.
I will use these sticky note tabs and write down potential break weeks and once my husband and I sit down to talk and finalize dates, I fill in on my paper what we’ve decided.
We homeschool for 36 weeks, breaking that up into 3 12-week terms. To mark my 3 different terms, I use different highlighter colors on my year in a glance pages. This gives me a helpful overview of how the homeschool year will be broken up and keep track of when we have breaks, and which homeschool week we are.
I know sick days and unplanned events take place in life so though we have our scheduled breaks here and there, my year in a glance isn’t something set in stone, but only serves to give me a better overview of how our weeks can look, and ways I can shift our schedule if needed. In fact, often times our school year stretches into May after all of our unplanned life events and sicknesses happen.
How I Choose My Break Weeks
For years we’ve split our 12-week terms into 6 weeks on, 1 week break, then finish the last 6 weeks (also known as “Sabbath scheduling”). While I love this idea, and we’ve found breaking up our terms with a break is essential to any burnout, it doesn’t actually always work out best for our family schedule to keep 6 weeks on, and 1 week off for all 3 terms.
For our 1st term, we will most likely hold to the 6 weeks on, 1 week off, and finish the term with no additional breaks. However, for our second and third term, I’ve decided it’s better to plan breaks around Thanksgiving (also happens to be both my children’s birthdays in the same Thanksgiving week), and Christmas. This means we will probably have 2-3 weeks on, and then take 1 week off for Thanksgiving, followed by another 3 weeks on before our longer Christmas time break of 3 weeks. Our final term is also in a season where we have better weather before the Summer heat comes so we’ve discussed planning our 3rd term break week loosely so that we can use it when the weather is best in Spring for a family trip.
Break weeks in our homeschool are held loosely, but we also don’t just stop our homeschool weeks for anything and everything. For some families that might work, but I learned early on that we need healthy boundaries around our homeschool time or we would never get anything accomplished, or done well. So while we love time with extended family or friends on a whim, and it is also a great freedom of homeschooling for other families, the freedom of that was taken when we were no longer in control of our homeschool days by saying yes to everyone and everything. In learning this, we have also learned the value of time management, better intentionally planning time with our extended family and friends, and the value of sometimes saying “This doesn’t work for us right now, but let’s plan for another time”.
Vision Casting and Goals
The last phase of my overview planning ends with some time intentionally reflecting on the last year, praying for the upcoming one, and writing out my homeschool vision, and educational goals for each child. Here I might also start brainstorming the curriculum direction we will focus on such as which time period in history we will study, and any main themes or topics we want to embark on.
I use the planning pages from the Homeschool Curriculum Planner and have a copy for each child.
I have goals and objectives for both myself and for my children because I know it takes me coming alongside them to meet these goals in the year. This is always a helpful evaluation for myself and my children, giving me the bigger picture whenever we hit a rough patch.
Some examples might include
- Read 5 books (Child)
- Learn to write in cursive (Child)
- Be consistent with piano practice (Child)
- Memorize the multiplication table (Child)
- Make reflection notes in the lesson planner at the end of each week (Mom)
- Establish a consistent “quiet time” for reading together (Mom)
- Prepare homeschool supplies, books, and materials the night before each homeschool day (Mom)
- More games and puzzles together in the afternoons to help concrete concepts learned (Mom)
One thing I started doing is writing out weekly reflections at the end of each homeschool week in my homeschool planner and so at the end of our current homeschool year, I will gather all those reflection notes and use them to guide my goals and objectives for the upcoming homeschool year. (My reflection notes are personal to my family so I won’t be sharing these publically)
Coming Up In This Blog Series…
In the next blog article, I will be sharing all about my process of subject by subject planning, scheduling, and a deeper look into what I am doing with each child, and what we’ll do together in a group. Stay tuned!
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