In this blog series, I’m sharing my process of planning out our 2024-2025 homeschool year for 4th and 1st grade. 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!
For Part 1 Overview Planning: Read Here!
For Part 2 Subject Lists and Subject Scheduling: Read Here!
Part 3 Curriculum, And My Hunt For Living Books: Read Here!
Part 3.5 How I Plan Our Charlotte Mason History Lessons: Read Here!
I answer a lot of common planning questions in the above parts of our yearly homeschool planning series so if you haven’t had the chance to read them, I highly encourage you to do so.
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Subject Timetable
Although we’re using a handful of curricula that already have planned out reading schedules or lessons, I still find it vital to get my eyes on all our subject lessons for each term on the front end. This allows me to intentionally plan for my own children, perhaps where we need to slow down a lesson and focus on it for two weeks or longer, or if certain lessons will require mapwork, a video resource, or something in addition to our normal reading and narrating. I start by taking all my paper planning notes from my homeschool curriculum planner and inputting them into a formal schedule using Google Sheets. You can purchase my editable Google Sheets Lesson Timetable for 2024-2025 here if you’d like to use it as a guide in creating your own.
I begin by creating a general subject timetable listing out the order of all our subjects, and how I plan to break them up between my year 4 and year 1 students. The colors in my timetable above are green = group subjects, pink = Year 4 independent studies, and blue = Year 1 independent studies. Since I have two students doing formal lessons, I’ll approach many of our lessons communally. However, with the age/level gap I have between my children, I’ve also had to plan time to do independent lessons with each of them.
How I Planned Group Vs. Independent Subjects
I want to start our homeschool day together, so almost all of our communal subjects are planned right at the front of our days. Some subjects like our history stream 1 (Year 1’s Ancient History), Geography, Shakespeare, Natural History, and Special Studies are on a loop throughout our 4-day week. Morning Collective will remain similar to our last few years, starting with Bible reading and prayer, and our beauty subjects on a loop such as poetry, songs, artist study, and nature journaling.
We will end our morning alternating between Year 4 and Year 1 independent studies. We sort of got a taste of how to alternate independent lessons this past year as we built homeschool table time habits and learned to take turns with mom’s help. The last bit of our morning before lunch is relatively the same schedule we kept throughout Kindergarten and Year 3 when alternating independent lessons with Mom.
Lunch And A Good Brain Break For Everyone
I know something is circling around the internet that says homeschoolers can be done with lessons before lunch (and it’s partly true). However, for our homeschool, that is simply not attainable anymore in order to do lessons peacefully and well. We are also not ones to go from one subject to another with no breaks in between (I usually need a refill on my water, switch over the laundry, make second breakfast, etc.). I’ve let go of my ideal plans for having an actual time slot for each subject for the sake of peace and sanity in our homeschool.
We love waking up slowly, having breakfast (enjoying coffee while it’s still hot), sending Dad off to work, getting a few chores done, or having a brisk walk on my walking pad while the kids have time to play outside. These are just some things I realized we need first to thrive peacefully at the homeschool table rather than waking up and rushing to do breakfast and school all at once.
That doesn’t mean our schedule is a free-for-all. Rather, I hope to work our short lessons in morning and afternoon blocks, intentionally separated by lunch, still with most of our afternoons open for things outside homeschool lessons.
Afternoon Lesson Block
After lunch, we will move into doing something physical (my kids enjoy following along with these cheesy exercise videos, or a walk around the neighborhood), or we will do logic/critical thinking activities. On a few days in the month, we will take our lunch to the library and spend this time picking out and bringing home new books, or meet up with friends for a simple picnic in the park once the weather cools down.
Lastly, our afternoon block is mainly to complete the remaining Year 4 subjects which are looped to do something different each day. During this time, my Year 1 is more than happy to run off and play independently while my oldest and I finish. As my oldest student continues to grow and take on more of her readings on her own, this may change as I envision one day giving her the reigns on scheduling more how she wants her school schedule to look. In the meantime, we both agree to have the majority of our lessons done before lunch, and the select few afterward is the best way to spread the feast.
Lesson Planning
Now that I have my subject timetable prepared, I began creating our more detailed lesson plans. I break up our lesson planning into 12 week terms. Some lessons are straightforward forward such as following our math or Latin curriculum, but with others, I need to pull our resources together and be able to know what page numbers to turn to, and which materials to have ready.
Although I already have the topics and books decided on for our entire year, I will only plan term 1 lessons at this time. Midway through term 1 (usually on a break), I will begin lesson planning for term 2 and then do the same in term 2 and lesson plan for term 3.
Because my master lesson plan sheets include parts of Ambleside Online’s schedules, I will not be sharing a full-page preview of our lessons laid out. Rather, please see the picture below for a simple visual reference of week 1. I also have a similar sheet created with Year 4 and Year 1 independent studies listed out in detail through weeks 1-12 (not shown).
Lesson Planning Example For Geography:
My children will be doing our geography subject together. We are taking the topic ideas for geography from Ambleside Online Year 1 and Year 4 and making it our own thing. Year 1’s main topic includes direction (N, E, S, W), and Year 4 focuses on bodies of water, and land (continents, hills, mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.). I first decide how I want to divide our topic in the allocated 12 weeks we have. I shared more about this planning step in Part 3.5 of our yearly planning blog series for our history lessons, but it also applies to how I plan for our geography.
I will plan for us to do a direction/compass lesson first, which will only take us one week, then the remaining 11 weeks I’ll divide between our land topics. This is how I broke it up in our first term:
We will spend one week on continents (only geographically, and not so much on continental cultural studies this term), one week on earth’s layers, two weeks on earthquakes and tectonic plates, two-three weeks on volcanoes, and 2 weeks on mountains, hills, and valleys. I purposefully left 2 weeks open in case we needed another week for any of our topics.
I finalized our selection of books we’ll be using and added page numbers to our lesson plans so I know exactly where to turn and when. I know we want to create a volcano (classic science experiment fun!), and I have several notebooking prompts/diagrams for us to add entries into our science journals so that also get added to our lesson plans throughout term one. There are several great videos from National Geographic that we will watch so I make a note, copy the links, and paste them right into my Google Sheet in the appropriate week. Lastly, we will have opportunities to see and identify our geography topics, one being to visit inactive volcanoes in AZ and visit the Grand Canyon during one of our break weeks!
You can find some of the Geography Resources we’re using this year here. I will be adding other resources down the road when I plan our terms 2 and 3.
Lesson planning has taken a tremendous amount of my time, but I believe it is an intentional investment into my children’s education and that makes it worth it. I’m at the end of my yearly homeschool planning with just some minor to-do’s left including printing materials (artist studies, recitations, maps, color-in/note science diagrams), replenishing pencils, planner tabs, highlighters, printer paper, and adding new books to our free reads baskets.
I’ll add our final schedules to my master homeschool binder and have everything ready to go for me when we start our 2024-2025 homeschool year in July!
Coming Soon:
A full breakdown of all our curriculum and resources we’ll use for 2024-2025!
Closing Thoughts
Plans on paper, even thoughtfully curated with intentional effort, may need to be adjusted in time. I hold all these plans loosely but aim to give our schedules a good 6+ weeks minimum before making any changes. ☺️
This is the end of the Yearly Homeschool Planning Series! I hope I was able to answer many of your planning questions in this series, but as always, I am happy to discuss anything further in the comments!
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