The first step to planning 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.

One of the hardest parts of planning out a 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 he grasped 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 she already knows, what she is able to process with some familiarity even if her answers are correct, and what is completely foreign to her.

Use your assessment results to help you evaluate what subjects will need the most time and energy.

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! Start instead by taking a look at the layout of a 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.

As you process through a typical week or unit, write down any questions you have. Once that’s done, quickly skim through the introductory material and notes to find those answers and see if any other information stands out.

The temptation for natural planners is to overplan, which can be as problematic as not planning at all. 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 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 paper homeschool planner.

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, it 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.