The blogosphere is ripe with posts about homeschool planning for the upcoming year!
I love it. I love planning. I love organizing. Many of you do. But ironically, each year we find ourselves revamping how we plan our year.
Here are five ways to totally FAIL at planning your homeschool year:
- Don’t plan at all – OK, I’ll go first: I didn’t actually “plan” our first year of homeschooling. *gasp* I thought that because I had a boxed curriculum and it contained teacher’s guides that all I needed to do was follow along. So, so, so wrong…
- Copy somebody else’s system verbatim – I love, love, love visiting other blogs and seeing how they plan and organize their homeschool year. I quickly learned, though, that copying them and what they do doesn’t work for us. I take what works, leave the rest, and move on to the next one. By doing this, I can create a system that works for our needs.
- Schedule your homeschool year the way everyone else does – It’s no secret that I hate waking up early. It’s also no secret that my husband works a rotating shift schedule. For almost two years I tried to do a “traditional” start-at-8-am-M-F school schedule. Finally, I realized it didn’t work for us and I didn’t need it to; I could make up my own schedule.
- Get hung up on what your kid is “supposed” to be learning – Sure, they need to learn stuff and they need to make progress. Does it really matter if they master their multiplication in third grade or the beginning of fourth grade? No. Trust me. In the grand scheme of things, they’ll be where they need to be. Keep up with assisting your kids in loving learning and making progress and the rest will fall into place.
- Over-schedule your kid – Yes, I’m guilty of over-scheduling myself {which is equally as bad}, but it should be repeated: Don’t sign your kids up for 15 different weekly activities. You’ll never get any substantial learning done, you know, the hard learning that should probably get done at some point…
About Tiffany Manley
Tiffany is the sparkly mastermind behind Sweet Phenomena. She hangs on Google+, Twitter, & Pinterest.
Good advice:) I think I was guilty of all of these at one time or another. Slowly finding my own groove:) I just published our new schedule for next year. Hope I haven’t been over ambitious:)
I’ll have to go check it out. I’ve been guilty of every last one, I think most of us are. And I think you’re right, we just have to find our own way.
Very, very true! But, I do so love to see how others do things to get ideas I can ‘tweak’ for my own family.
I’m in the midst of planning right now and after a few years of things ‘interrupting’ our schedule, I need to get a bit more rigid.
Laura, I absolutely love to see how others do things and then tweak them. I’m guilty of doing every last one of these things, though, and I’ve learned that it really does involve tweaking for your own family.
I so know what you mean about stuff interrupting your schedule; we’ve dealt with that the past couple of years. I’m hoping to avoid it this year.
I’m a curator for Scoop.it and I shared your blog post on my Scoop.it Homeschool Resources site at http://www.scoop.it/t/homeschool-resources/. Good advice!
Thanks Robin!
Love this. I’m struggling with trying to stay loose and go-with-the-flow versus scheduling everything down to the minute. Since this is our first year, I just don’t know how long things will take us. At least I’ll have a plan to start out and we can change it up as we go along.
I think that’s the important thing, to just remember that you can always change it if needed. I still have to remind myself of it. And always remember to enjoy it!