Planning Our New Homeschool Year (Part 1 of 4)

Post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

You are in for a treat as I will be going into detail how I will be planning our new homeschool year!

This year I will only have 3 in our homeschool. Two have graduated now and I have the three youngest ones left. While I am excited for a new year, it always makes me a little sad when my children graduate out of our homeschool.

I thought I would type up how I go about my homeschool planning and share some of the things we will be using. Over the next couple weeks, I will be publishing a 4-part series on my process for planning out our homeschool year.

Please understand that my way is not the only way or the right way for everyone. This is just what is working for us. But I know that I love reading about how others plan their year, as I can glean some tidbits that can help me in my own planning. I pray that what I share will be an encouragement to you and hopefully you can come away with some new ideas to try!

The first thing I do when beginning my planning for a new year is to set my schedule.

Set My Schedule For The Year

Setting our schedule for the year involves deciding when we will start school, what weeks we will take off, and when our last day of school will be.

I know that we will homeschool for 36 weeks, so I try to schedule about 17 or 18 weeks of school before Christmas Break and 18 or 19 weeks after.

Print Out Calendars

To start, I print out yearly calendars for the school year. So for this year, I printed out 2017 and 2018 yearly calendars.

I start by marking off 2 weeks over Christmas Break.

Once I have done that, I work backwards and plan 6 or 7 weeks of school, then a 1 week break, until I have 17 or 18 weeks of school schedule. I highlight the weeks that we will take breaks, and circle the date we will start school.

I then do the same after Christmas Break, scheduling out the rest of the year (6 weeks on, 1 week off) until we have 36 weeks.

Write Out Intervals

After I have done that, then I write out the intervals so I can easily see how our year is going to be divided up.

As you can see, I have 36 weeks of homeschool scheduled out in intervals. (Later in this series, I will explain how I plan each interval so that I can adjust our schedule as we go!)

Add to Google Calendar

Now that I have this all written out, I go into my Google Calendar and add the intervals to our calendar. I just like to be able to quickly see on my calendar what weeks we have off. It helps me when things come up that I need to schedule, so I know if that is a week we will be doing school or if it is a break week.

As you can see above, I made a “calendar” in Google Calendar called “Homeschool”. That way it is a different color than anything else on my calendar. I then went in and made an all day event that ran for the whole week, then labeled it with the Interval # and Week #. It just gives me a quick reference for when we will be doing homeschool and how many weeks we are into the year.

Add Break Weeks to Kids’ Intentional Weekly Planners

After I have added the intervals to Google Calendar, I go into each of my kids’ Intentional Weekly Planners and mark out the weeks we will be taking breaks.

Later I will explain how I plan out my kids’ Table Time work using the Intentional Weekly Planner, but for now I wanted to make sure I added this step here. It will be important when I get ready to plan out their work, to know which weeks we will be taking breaks!