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One of the biggest headaches (or joys) for many homeschooling families is coming up with their ideal homeschool schedule – whether that means that it’s a daily homeschool schedule, weekly homeschool schedule, or a schedule for the whole homeschool year.
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Sometimes, it’s a blessing to just see what others are doing so you can take some of their ideas, sprinkle in your own ideas, mix it all up, and then come up with a schedule that fits your family perfectly. We’re excited to try to help you with that venture by offering you The Ultimate Guide to Homeschool Scheduling.
The Ultimate Guide to Homeschool Scheduling
Daily Homeschool Schedules and Planning
If you or your child loves checklists, this idea (with examples) for using a checklist to guide school work might be perfect for your family!
Need a visual schedule for your kids for their daily schedules? This is so great for people with younger kids or some kids with special needs as well.
Want some tips on how to create your homeschool schedule? Roan gives tips and guidelines for putting together your homeschool schedule.
Do you think everyone is busy schooling by 8 am each morning? Just remember – everyone’s schedules look different, and Kris proves to us that you can homeschool successfully even if you aren’t starting as early at the local schools.
Kendra is helping us with steps to consider while figuring out your daily homeschooling schedule (in a post called Homeschool Scheduling 101), as well as to share her daily schedule with us.
A daily schedule with preschoolers can look different for everyone, but this is the daily schedule (and I mean the whole day!) for preschool at home from Motherhood on a Dime.
Roan shared her daily schedule for homeschooling, on the occasion of the beginning of her 11th year of homeschooling!
Daily Homeschool Schedules and Planning with Specific Homeschooling Methods
Colleen from Raising Lifelong Learners shared her daily schedule for homeschooling using an interest-led method for gifted children.
Are you a Charlotte Mason style homeschooler? Check out Cindy’s suggestions for a Typical Day in a Charlotte Mason homeschool at Our Journey Westward.
It can be easy to get busy while homeschooling and forget to really educate your whole child (not just the parts we think need to be worked on). Michelle talked about using Head, Heart, and Hands: Daily Rhythms and Educating the Whole Child in her often Waldorf-inspired approach.
If you love the Montessori method, you’ll want to check out this thorough guide to one family’s daily homeschool schedule using the Montessori method, with a special emphasis on meeting the needs of a child with special needs.
Weekly Homeschool Schedules and Planning
I have often Googled about homeschooling schedules as I have tweaked our own homeschooling schedule. Each time, I have found the suggestions from Oklahoma Homeschooling to be invaluable. They have PDF samples available. Just go to this page on their site and scroll until you find the “Schedules” links in the first grouping of links (under the heading of “Homeschool Forms created by Cindy Downes”).
I love that this weekly homeschool schedule from Our Journey Westward even has a table laid out of which subjects the students complete each day.
Broken down by the scheduled subjects for each school day, I shared our weekly homeschool scheduled for a 1st grader, 5th grader, and 6th grader.
Even if you don’t subscribe to the Charlotte Mason style of homeschooling, I found the sample weekly homeschool schedules from Simple Charlotte Mason to be an amazing jumping off point for writing out my own weekly schedule.
Perhaps you don’t think a traditional weekly schedule will work for your family. You might consider this block schedule for weekly homeschool scheduling that Ticia is using.
Yearly Homeschool Schedules and Planning
Barb from Harmony Arts Mom shares a very detailed account of how to plan for an entire year worth of homeschooling. This is an amazing guide not to miss at Curriculum Choice.
Toni from The Happy Housewife shares the way that she schedules her homeschooling. Considering that she has homeschooled for over 11 years and has a large family, her advice comes from a lot of experience.
Want to see some possible options for laying out your homeschool calendar for the school year? Roan from Joyful Always talks about some of the most common options for laying out your 180 days (or whatever is required where you live).
If that wasn’t enough motivation, Mystie from Simple Convivial shares a whole series of posts about planning a whole school year at a time. (She was actually inspired by Kendra’s post mentioned above.)
Maybe it’s just the organizing junkie in me speaking, but this color-coded progress chart to map out a school year at Amongst Lovely Things made me have heart palpitations when I saw it. Love it!
In what is probably a testament to that organizing junkie in me, I shared about the way we previously organized our homeschooling papers and materials in what was a move to both organize and schedule out our homeschool year.
Homeschool scheduling certainly looks different when you get to the high school level. That’s one reason that I loved this way from The Happy Housewife to organize homeschool high school credits for planning purposes.
Still just not sure where to start? Mary offers us a light at the end of the tunnel with ways to get a grip on homeschool planning.
Other Homeschool Scheduling and Planning Tips: Events and Field Trips
Field trips can be an amazing addition to your homeschooling adventure. Kris is a master of planning field trips for her homeschooling group, and she is sharing what she has learned about planning a successful homeschooling field trip with us.
Field trips aren’t the only fun group activity you can plan. You can plan out a homeschool group party by taking these steps into consideration before your big (or small) event.
If you’re helping to plan your homeschool group’s co-op, then it might help you to check out these easy tips to help you plan a great homeschool co-op year from Tonya of The Traveling Praters.
Other Homeschool Scheduling and Planning Tips: Planning Unit Studies
Always wanted to try unit studies but not sure where to start? Cindy has suggestions of How to Plan a Unit Study.
Lauren from Mama’s Learning Corner also lays out how she plans simple unit studies. She even has a video where she talks more about it (and where she shares a free unit study planning packet)!
Other Homeschool Scheduling and Planning Tips: Tot School
Are you doing tot school with your young kids? Heather shares their tot school and preschool routine and other resources for kids ages three and four.
Here’s a whole daily schedule for doing tot school.
Other Homeschool Scheduling and Planning Tips: Various Topics and Logistics
Monday mornings can be tough. After a weekend of rest (or even worse – a weekend full of plans), it can be hard to ease back into a week of school. Julianna shared tips with us to make Monday mornings more successful for your homeschool.
There are so many opportunities for adding extras to your homeschooling. In fact, there are so many that there just isn’t enough time to do it all. Tricia from Hodgepodge shares some ideas for finding time to add in those homeschooling extras.
Are you constantly driving around in the car from one activity to another? Here are ways you can take advantage of the time in your car and schedule some of your homeschooling to be car-schooling.
Need to get in a habit of having habits to keep you scheduled and on task in your homeschooling? Check out this wonderful list of links to help you get in the habit of habits.
Have you found that your schedule is just too busy? Are you and the kids almost in tears because you’ve overscheduled? It might be time to consider cutting the clutter from your schedule to free up time.
It’s tempting to make a schedule that you think is right but doesn’t really flow for your needs. Instead, why not make a homeschool schedule that works for you?
Busy juggling a wide variety of ages? Tricia from Hodgepodge wrote up an amazing post about how to school with a variety of ages, including lots of links to other posts about scheduling.
Work your way to a more smoothly running school day with 10 tips from Roan. Really – who couldn’t use a school day that ran a little more smoothly, right?
If you’re absolutely opposed to a schedule and just can’t make them work for you no matter what you do, maybe you should try to work with rhythms and routines in your homeschool instead of schedules. That post was written by Michelle with the “Chronically Random” in mind.
The Ultimate Guide to Homeschool Scheduling is part of iHomeschool Network’s Ultimate Guide list.
This post was originally published on The Homeschool Classroom, which is now part of Real Life at Home, on August 9, 2012. It was updated in July 2016.
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Rebecca says
Thank you for this….I added our youngest to our ‘school’ this year…and still trying to identify a good schedule for everyone. I can’t wait to dig through all of these resources for the sage advice provided. Thank you!
Joan says
AWESOME ideas, Angie. I thank you for taking the time to compile them!
I actually included this whole post in my own ultimate guide, to balancing homeschooling as a working mom, because there is soooo much great stuff here 🙂
Rebecca says
Great ideas to add to my school planner
Colleen P says
Much needed links for me, particularly the “cutting the clutter” one. I appreciate the wisdom of more experienced homeschoolers to help me develop a working schedule for our family. Thank you!
Cindy says
Wonderful! Pinned it!
Wendy Clark says
Thank you for the link to Toni’s high school credit planner. I soooo needed this.
Carol S. says
Thank you for posting this. I know that I’m not the only one that struggles mightily with preparing homeschool schedules that actually work in the real world with a real family. I do enjoy seeing what works for others as it always sparks an idea or two for my own family as well!
Evelyn Curtis says
Wow! There are so many great resources here! Thank you so much!