Create a Home School Planner that Works

Create a home school planner that works and start crushing home school today.

Here's what you'll learn in this article: 

• Create a home school planner that works and start crushing home school today with new learning experiences.
• A strategy for creating and using a home school planner to elevate your home school experience with more learning and less stress.
• Answers to common questions about using a home school planner.
• Key takeaways to create and use a home school planner that works for you and your family.
• Where you can get additional resources to keep learning and thriving with home school.
  

Creating a Home School Planner Allows You to Intentionally Craft an Epic Home School Experience

People often consider themselves planners or not, and associate planning with all sorts of other attributes like being organized and always put together. Planning can also be viewed as the limiter of spontaneity and fun. However, when thinking about the success of the home school experience you are creating, let’s leave the labels and negativity about planning behind and treat planning as what it is at its core: a process to help you get where you want to go. A home school planner is a resource for you to make notes, record quotes and themes, track curriculum ideas, prepare for milestones, develop lessons, etc.

Still not convinced?

When you go to a store you follow a route. That’s a plan. When you pick an outfit in the morning. That’s a plan. When you make a meal. That’s a plan too. People crave consistency (see our article on the benefits of starting school at the same time each day), and the security that it provides. Taking it further, planning provides the foundation for richer experiences. For example, if you are considering a field trip to the zoo, think of how much richer you can make that experience if you plan in advance to print a map for your child to chart the route or if you research the animals ahead of the visit. Here are four steps to create a home school planner that will inspire you (and your children):

4 Steps for Creating a Home School Planner that Works

If you don’t have a home school planner, these steps will get you started. If you already have a planner, then reflect on what is and isn’t working and use these steps to make adjustments to your current practice. Treat the use of a home school planner as an experiment in creativity, not a task.

1. Find a Format for Your Home School Planner that Fits Your Life

Planning is a process to help you achieve your goals. How you plan is all about individual needs and preferences. Do you like paper and pen? A note on your phone? If you don’t know, that might be what is holding you back from using planning as a process.

Finding what works for you is about being open to experimenting over the course of a few weeks. To get started, you will need a format that allows you to record ideas, organize ideas, implement ideas, and reflect on the implemented ideas:

Record Ideas. To always have a resource to record ideas, you might start with your phone. Planning is an active process, so you want to have what you need, when you have an idea. Leverage your phone and use a running note, voice memo, or email to record your ideas. This doesn’t mean you cannot also use a notebook, but often times a notebook is not as accessible as a phone. 

Organize Ideas. When you are ready to organize your recorded ideas, try a dedicated notebook to write out what you’ve recorded to find patterns and prepare for implementing. For example, if you’ve been thinking about what you want to do for an end-of-year review, you may have a list of ideas in your phone that you can transfer to a notebook to organize by subject and prioritize.

Implement Ideas. When it is time to implement your ideas, you might move to a home school schedule--which could be a paper calendar or bullet journal on your phone. Continuing with the end-of-year review example, you may decide to dedicate a day to each subject and tag the days to balance what your child finds more or less difficult. For example, if math and science are two favorites, they might be at the beginning and end of the week, instead of on consecutive days.

Reflect on Ideas. As you go or at the end of a planning activity, make note where you record ideas about what worked and what didn’t. Then when you resume the planning process you can make adjustments as necessary. For example, if the end-of-year review took much longer for one subject than you expected, make a note to account for that next year.

2. Find the Time to Use Your Home School Planner

Starting a new process takes more effort at first. The secret is to rapidly make adjustments to what didn’t work and keep going. The process will get easier and be uniquely suited to you. Think of the day as morning, afternoon, and evening. When can you record, organize, implement, and reflect on ideas? Pick a time of day for each. If the day comes and you find that reflecting in the evening worked well, but organizing during lunch was too chaotic, then adjust for the next day. You’ll also get a sense of how much planning you need to do. 

3. When to Use Your Home School Planner

All year! A home school planner is a living resource that you will use for as long as you home school. It creates a space for all things home school. How do you keep track of your child’s home school requests? How do you create continuity in the year’s learning? How do you incorporate seasonal traditions and recognize home school milestones? These are just some uses of your planner. You will want to use it for what is important to you and your child. 

4. Putting the Parts Together to Use Your Home School Planner

There are so many uses for a home school planner that you don’t need to wait for a certain time of year to begin. Start now!

What is your next home school priority? It could be planning field trips. Try a format that resonates with you to record and organize ideas at a time of day that resonates with you. When is the soonest you can implement an intentional field trip? You might spend a few days recording and organizing a few ideas, then gather and research materials to implement. Then you might take a few more days to implement and actually go on the field trip. After the event, reflect on what you learned. The process is the same for activities like creating a daily routine, elevating learning expectations, and trying new home school activities in the home.

A Real-Life Example

Creating a home school planner has enabled each year of homeschooling to be better than the prior year. The schedule is continually tweaked to adapt to new learning activities. Extracurriculars are spread throughout the year to prevent doing too much. Special events are included to acknowledge transitions.

Format. We use a note on the phone to record ideas as they come. It includes categories to allow for some initial organizing: mantras and quotes to guide decision making; home school rules; ideas to elevate projects; reading list; ideas for recurring weekly activities; ideas for field trips and extracurriculars; ideas for the next grade-level; ideas for continuous learning over Summer; subject specific activities. 

When it is time to implement an idea, we switch to a paper notebook to more easily interact and visually see how the plan is coming together. If there are 20 ideas for field trips, and only 10 weeks of school left, then the ideas will be narrowed to avoid experiences that are too similar and arrange what fits with other parts of the week. 

Use. Recording the ideas happens all the time. Each Sunday evening all the ideas are reviewed and pulled into a “to do” list, as appropriate. Once on the to do list, the idea is organized and implemented. Likewise, as part of the Sunday review of the recorded ideas, reflections are recorded to consider next time.

Following this process the home school planner is a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tool to create a home school education with learning at the forefront. 

FAQs: Creating a Home School Planner that Fits Your Needs

What if there is too much to plan?

You have a few options. One option is to start small. What is the smallest part of home school that you want to be different? Is it doing a weekly art lesson or having a 10-minute morning routine to start the day? Follow the process above and once you achieve that part, do another.

Another option is to dedicate a larger chunk of time like a half- or full-day to plan a number of parts at once. Following the same process as above, you can record all the ideas you need to plan, then you can organize them into categories and assign priorities. Go through your top priorities and proceed with organizing, implementing, and reflecting.

What Should I do if My Home School Planning Didn’t Work?

Reflect! If it felt overwhelming, break it into smaller steps. If the format didn’t fit, try another one. If you wanted to plan in the morning, but didn’t, then try the evening. If planning felt like a waste of time, then make sure you are planning activities that you care about for your home school experience. If you live in an area where regular field trips aren’t an option, don’t try to force a plan that isn’t feasible. There is plenty to learn, and there are plenty of approaches you can take without incorporating field trips into your home school curriculum.

Key Takeaways

• Craft intentional homeschooling. Creating a home school planner lets you create the home school experience you desire for your family.
• Find a format that fits. The best home school planner uses a format that supports you, whether digital, paper, or a combination.
• Focus on recording, organizing, implementing, and reflecting on ideas. Find a format for your home school planner that lets you follow the simple process of recording, organizing, implementing, and reflecting.
• Find a time that fits. Incorporate using your home school planner into your regular routine by experimenting to find what works.
• Make your home school planner your most valuable resource. Use your home school planner all year for all of the home school topics important to you.
  

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