Why is Planning for Home School Important?
Embarking on the home-schooling journey is daunting and anything that can assist with the transition should be embraced.
By planning and creating a schedule, it helps us maintain focus, prioritise tasks and increase productivity and time management.
I like to think of the homeschool lifestyle as a business that needs to grow adapt and achieve results.
Planning the Business of Home School
Every successful business needs to start with a business plan that provides the guidelines for great management, customer service and quality control( teacher, student & results)
The more effort you put into the planning the quicker and easier it will be to see positive results. Therefore you need to get this business under control and running smoothly and efficiently.
So planning for this schedule is one of the hardest tasks to achieve as it needs lots of thought, balance and flexibility. You need to know all the relevant information and considerations prior to actually creating it.
We talk about planing in the first Chapters of my e-book:
How to Homeschool – The Good the Bad and the Ugly Realities of Doing it Successfully
Create an Easy to Follow Schedule
Our aim is for you, to be able to create a schedule that is easy to follow and for you to be able to set realistic goals that can be achieved. It is also important to plan and leave some flexibility for the unexpected.
As time is the most valuable commodity in our life, it is something that we want and need more of. As long as our days can sometimes be, we always seem to need more of it.
With this in mind it is important to prioritise our time and our commitments by creating a schedule.
Finding a balance between what we have to do, what we need to do and what we want to do is not an easy task.
Home School Planning Tools
As a parent trying to manage the kids schedules and running the household a weekly planner is an essential tool that we all need in our lives.
Alas, TOOLS that you will need :
your diary + a plan + a planner = a schedule.
This is what we will do with the tools :
- Refer to your own personal Diary or Calendar to copy important dates, events, commitments etc.
- Know all the subjects your child (or each child) will be learning
- Write down allocated online lesson days and times (usually in 30minute blocks) that must be attended online if enrolled in a school program. Remembering you will be either hands on or supervising during this time.
- Allocate days for extracurricular activities that have set times (sports practice, music lessons etc)
- Any other regular weekly appointments that need to be considered. (grocery shopping day, play dates, gym days etc)
Then you need to actually add all the information you have correlated onto a planner. You can make a computer-generated Planner template yourself or these can often be purchased from a local stationary supplier or online from reputable school resource supplier.
The best planners have a daily planner that also incorporates a full week’s schedule per page from Monday to Sunday.
So with all the information you have gathered from the above list, pencil in the activities and lesson that are least flexible or that have most priority onto the planner first.
Schedule Daily Lesson Blocks
Next is to add the time allocated for study each day onto the planner. This can be broken up into small sessions of 30 minute blocks or as a complete study period eg. 10am to 1.30pm. As the parent you may be hands on teaching your child or supervising during these times.
Depending on this you may be able to multi task during this time and get housework done or enjoy a quick coffee or better still a nap.
Once this is added to the planner you have now created a SCHEDULE.
The Finished Schedule
This schedule will show you, as the parent, what to do and where to be every day. Hopefully your everyday household chaos will become “organised chaos” as I prefer.
Stick to a realistic, planned schedule and your life and home will become far easier to manage. Combining all the responsibilities and commitments that Homeschool parents have to undertake is no easy task.
And like I always say : No pay, but plenty of pride !!!
In addition to the parent schedule this same type of planning needs to be done for every individual child so they know what needs to be done concerning their lessons and study time everyday also.
With all of the Planning and Schedules it assists us to be able to direct and create efficient TIME MANAGEMENT. And in turn, this helps us alleviate unwanted stress and makes room for more time to spend doing the things that make us happy and creates harmony in the household.
We talk about planing in the first Chapters of my e-book: How to Homeschool – The Good the Bad and the Ugly Realities of Doing it Successfully. I go into great detail about if you should, or you should not try homeschooling. In depth how to do it for planing and scheduling home-school sessions.
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