Most of us have wondered how to make a school schedule simpler yet accomplish more. We want flexibility but we also want to know that stuff is being taught and learned along the way.
So here’s a peek into one of my favourite methods – a “year-at-a-glance planning”!
I like to post an overview year-at-a glance chart.
UPDATE: You can now purchase printable charts to assemble into a large poster, in our shop here. Currently we have a garden theme, floral theme, and a nautical themed style to choose from!
Setting a specific goal such as “Reading Comprehension every morning from 10:30-11:00” did not work for us. Our “schedule” each year is similar to past years which means “school” is about 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. M-F including all of the lunch chores, interruptions, breaks, household and family needs, etc..
The year-at-a-glance chart was SO HELPFUL for whenever those day-to-day plans were not working well!
Eventually, I also came to a point of putting certain subjects down for certain days of the week and some sort of order a few years later as you can see pictured on the “Simplifying Homeschool Schedules” post here.
I would highly recommend a “Year-at-a-Glance” plan for anyone starting out homeschooling or anyone who is anticipating lots of changes during the school year such as renovations, construction, new baby, moving, unpacking, etc.. It simply is so handy!
How I Personally Plan with a Poster –
I think of how much schooling we’d like to do (total time to divide) –
Length of School = Mornings AND Afternoons
(For us, it’s not just a 2-hour day.)
Before you gasp too much over the “long hours of school”, I have to clarify something VERY important here. I’m happen to be a fan of lifelong learning and of teaching my children that education is not a burden, but is truly an enjoyable and worthwhile activity with which to spend lots of time in childhood.
School-time at our house is not just bookwork because we’d find that too boring.
We don’t just want to “finish schoolwork” and then have fun – – – we want to have fun with the schoolwork!
We mix together oral discussions, hands-on things, free-play, and practical applications where possible on a skill or topic.
And they learn to have fun learning independently from “mom” too so that I can be free to do “mom stuff” not just “teacher stuff” throughout the day.
I’ll also say that, just because “Joy and her clan” “plan for school” for “that long” each day, does NOT mean that YOU, as a customer of PSLC curriculum, will have to do the same. Your hours spent for school will vary depending on how many children you have and how many subject areas you are learning in your household.
To my “ordinary” curriculum, I add non-academic things like learning to sew, bake bread, cook, garden, use tools, care for goats, short active recesses, etc. which has no “curriculum” pages to notebook with but I still consider them an important part of my children’s education.
A co-op or homeschool group event is also “school” to us.
(But personal chores or regular errands are not “school” to us. Neither is free-time or after school riding of bikes or helping with supper or laundry.)
So I aim to guide them throughout the day, into lots of good things to learn rather than just letting them waste time with an over-abundance of entertainment or just always reading when they could be doing something better for hours each day.
We do like to be balanced in our real life education experiences.
And also, my life might have a lot more interruptions than yours.
I don’t want anyone to be “scared” to read more on this website because of my honesty of how homeschooling works in our family.
OK, now back to this flexible chart thing….
How does the chart work? Where will I put it (i.e. readability)?
A planner in a book format or binder is more awkward to me, although I’ve used one before for a while when I had fewer children. A wall chart is much more useful.
My hands are busy. This method is hands-free. I can hold a toddler while reading it. I can eat breakfast while reading it. My tired brain can focus better if I see the “big picture” and relate it to other necessities at the moment. And I know that my preschooler won’t flip my page to lose my spot when my back is turned.
It runs on no batteries and is much easier to read than fine print on a device. I save time and energy by not pulling out a planner and putting it away again daily.
I can colour-code it too or add stickers if I want to be creative.
If I want to change something, I easily can put a white label over it and write the new idea.
I can draw thicker horizontal lines to guess at where a school break might occur. But I’m not crossing out any dates nor losing much space if I guess wrong, because well, it’s just a line.
Highlighting when completed –
As we complete a topic, I check it off my big annual list of things to study wall chart by colouring the box in with a crayon or pale marker. (In case you’ve heard of the “loopy” or “looping” system, it is sort of like it but it has some significant differences too. Although, I guess you could use the chart to “loop” in a sense too.)
Setting Up the Columns
The first column is a large number representing each week (e.g. 1, 2, 3, and so on. I put down for about 33 weeks as I feel this is very reasonable.
(I don’t usually put down a full year even if we are doing things like art and more science over a summer “break”. This is just for the main academic year.)
The topics (some would call them sub-topics) are then listed in the rest of the columns (like what you might see in a table of contents).
The headings for each column might be “Math for JK/SK”, then “Math for Grade 2”, then “Math for Grade 6” (or use names of the children instead of the grades). Multi-grade subjects just have single columns.
At a glance, I can see what we want to accomplish this year (e.g. gears, forces, properties of materials) and choose to work with those topics/skills whenever it looks like it’s a good time.
Maybe everyone is getting strained with math for a week so we can simply carry on with other subjects and give math a break until a week and a half later or so. No guilt and no straining the brain to try to rework something to fit it all in. We just complete subjects as we do until the end.
If that means we double-up on math for the last week when we’re already done spelling, then so be it.
One more note, it’s very helpful to you if a box doesn’t just say “Animal Science” but rather in just a few words, is very specific to trigger your memory such as “Animals – classification”, or “parts of a fish” for each lesson box in the chart. As another example of being specific, rather than just “geometry”, say “3-D shapes” or “angles”. Being specific helps you to know if you need to have manipulatives or other supplies or media easily found by children.
Advantages
It’s advantageous to plan for the year ahead of time – to see your reasonable goals at one glance and to see if you’re on track with accomplishing anything of value.
If you are finding that one subject area hardly has any highlighting in a column, you can adjust your week’s focus, at least for a time, to add more variety again (i.e. avoid getting stuck in a rut).
Personally, I’m not the kind of mom who has the time to plan each week at the beginning of it either, so I just do batch planning like this for a year and it is a lot easier and reassuring for me.
PLUS, this method helps to keep things fresh and somewhat of a m y s t e r y , although there is still an order that I aim for and the children know what to expect to some extent.
I don’t know about you but since I live WITH my students, it can be harder to surprise them. So with this method, they think they have a clue (which they do) but they don’t have to exactly know what “Mom” is going to have them do on a particular week.
It also means that if I forgot to get some supplies from town or someone is too sick with a stuffed nose or strained wrist for one topic but feeling OK for a different one or the weather is more suitable for something else or the kids are tired, grumpy, bored, easily distracted and the bicycle or garden dirt is calling them, I can change my teacher’s plan super-fast and not waste a day or feel guilty or scatter-brained with “What do I do now??”, when the unexpected bounces into daily life with the same fervour as spring fever.(Whew – what a super-long sentence!)
Hey, if gears are a topic somewhere on my list, why not suddenly go outside and study their bikes! (Then of course, usually complete the studies for that topic of gears before moving to another science topic like animals.)
How refreshing is it to announce that you have a use for the packaging that just came in the mail and you will be making cardboard snowshoes for part of the school day since the snow is just right for learning about things like absorption of paper and distribution of forces?!
Everyone seems to thrive on the elements of variety, relevance to daily life, and surprise!
So, this is the sort of planning system that I like to post up on a wall where I (the adult who coordinates stuff) can read it when I’m planning in my mind for what I’ll do next.
For our entire family, it’s just putting together ONE very flexible plan per year rather than constantly re-working a calendar system or a weekly list.
The disadvantages? These seem to relate to “the space(s)” for “where” to put it. The poster idea worked very well when the base for our family’s homeschooling was just in a house – a house that had space on walls to post things. We could see it while we prepared breakfast, cleaned in the evening, etc.. And as mentioned, I really, really like being able to see, at a glance, the entire plan for sub-topics for the whole school year without flipping through books or binders!
But as of a few years ago, a good portion of our school life is in a separate space from our living areas and actually outside of our house in another building. And our current house has very little wall space anyway to hang posters on. I have tried to fold the poster to take with me wherever we are doing school but that was bothersome. I also tried keeping the poster on my closet door but I didn’t like that option overly well because I wanted to read it not just in the morning but also when we were outside the house.
This past year I found a system that works well for our current situation of schooling frequently outside in our yard/yurt. That is to condense the poster/chart idea into a few papers per clipboard. I can carry one clipboard per day that keeps a page per subject of the subjects that we look at for that day of the week. If it is a subject that we do more than one day a week, I can photocopy the subject’s mini-poster page plan for the year and add it to the other appropriate clipboard(s).
(Perhaps someday I’ll share more about that modification, since it could be useful to a few others who also homeschool frequently outside of their house.)
Additional Help for Schedules and Routines:
Amy Roberts, another homeschool mom/blogger, has spoken at homeschool conferences on the area of schedules and routines very well. (Full Disclosure: This is not an affiliate link. I do not receive any compensation for recommending her website to you. However, she has mentioned my blog/website within a course of hers as a good example of a “routine” type of schedule so you might see my name briefly there.)