Prepare for the Homeschool Year by Setting Parameters

The first step as you prepare for the new year is to set a start and ending date for your school year. How many weeks are included between those dates? Be sure to also consider birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, holidays, and known commitments while figuring in at least a couple of weeks of discretionary time for medical appointments, unexpected family or friend time, illness, or other interruptions.

You might be wondering if year-round schooling would create an exception to this step as you prepare for the school year. The answer is no. Even if you school year-round, you need to have a goal to work toward in order to make sure your child progresses well each year. So, you still need to set a date at which one school year ends and the next starts.

Keep in mind, though, that setting a start and end date can flex from subject to subject. If your student is moving very quickly through language arts but needs a little more time in math, it’s okay to set individual date goals for each subject. You don’t have to hold your student back in one subject just to keep them on track in another.

Prepare for the Homeschool Year by Assessing Your Child

One of the biggest challenges as you prepare for the homeschool year is the uncertainty of how much time is needed for each concept and topic. To help give you an idea of what aspects of the year will take more time and every, take the time to assess where your child is academically before you start planning. You can do this in two ways:

– Assess your child’s grasp of last year’s work to determine what things were processed well, what still takes effort, and what gaps continue to exist.
– Assess your child based on concepts which will be covered in the coming year to see what they already know, what they are able to process with some familiarity even if specific answers to questions are incorrect, and what is completely foreign information.

Some curricula include placement tests with each subject to help you assess your child. You can also use an assessment like Well Planned Start for a general evaluation. If no evaluation exists to meet your needs, use the first week of lesson plans to evaluate how ready your student is for the new year. Use your assessment results to help you evaluate what subjects will need the most time and energy.

Prepare for the Homeschool Year by Familiarizing Yourself with Resources

At the beginning of many resources, you will see a note that urges you to read through every detail before you get started. But in truth, few of us have time to even scratch the surface of all of that reading in the middle of everything else we have to do to prepare for the homeschool year!

Start instead by taking a quick look at the layout of a typical lesson or unit. Consider the total number of lessons or units, then evaluate how many days you have to complete each one to meet your target end date.

Next, pick a few random lessons from throughout the material and read through them more closely. As you process the material for a typical week or unit, write down any questions you have.

Once that’s done, you’ll have context for what information you need to glean from the introductory material. This allows you to quickly skim through the introduction and any teacher notes to find those answers and see if any other information stands out, thus saving you time and mental energy for the rest of what you need to explore as you prepare for the homeschool year.

A Special Tip to Help Natural Planners Prepare for the Homeschool Year

The temptation for natural planners is to overplan, which can be as problematic as not planning at all as you prepare for the homeschool year. Here are a some ways planners can effectively lay out the year while still maintaining necessary flexibility:

• Choose resources that make it easy to have a general idea of what’s coming or that have clearly laid out lessons or units.
• Use an online or computer based planning tool such as Well Planned Gal’s Online Planner that allows you to easily bump individual assignments and rearrange plans as needed.
• If you are a die-hard paper planner gal, use the digital planner for the whole year, then write assignments for the coming week only in your printed homeschool planner.

A Special Tip to Help Non-Planners Prepare for the Homeschool Year

Planning is necessary even for those who are not natural planners. Without it, there is no framework for ensuring that certain mile markers and goals are reached in a timely fashion. But, planning to prepare for the homeschool year doesn’t have to look the same for non-planners as it does for natural planners.

• When selecting curriculum, find resources that provide pre-done lesson plans to help you stay on track.
• Break courses down into manageable, six-week batches. At the end of each batch, evaluate where you are in comparison to your goal, then set an attainable goal for the next six weeks.
• At the end of each day, jot down what you completed that day so you can analyze what helped your reach your short-term goal or caused you to lag behind.