There exist veteran homeschool moms that are experts at homeschool planning and organizing. They are so good, they offer courses on how to follow their systems. I applaud those moms. I am not one of those moms. Yes, I just started my 16th year of homeschooling, but that doesn’t make me an expert mom. I’m more of a “tweak and change things” kind of mom who likes to keep things simple. Since there may be other moms who like to keep things simple, I’m starting a “Super Simple Homeschooling” series. I’ll be sharing the ways I keep homeschooling simple in our home. This post is on super simple homeschool calendar planning.
The first step I take in homeschool planning is mapping out my calendar year. This will show me which days we will be in school and which days we will take as vacation days.
Let’s get on with the super simple homeschool calendar planning!
Choose a simple calendar
I like to print out a simple calendar that shows the academic year at a glance. I really like Calendarpedia.com for my calendars. Here’s an example of one of their calendars that I’ll be using this year. I’ll print it out in black and white because I use my own color coding on it.
Their calendars are free to download and print. They come as Word documents, Excel files, and Pdfs. They have a huge selection of calendars.
Another great source for calendars is Calendarlabs.com. They have a wide variety of printables that are also downloadable and free. You’ll see further down that I actually used one of their calendars last year.
Figure out how many days you’ll have school
In California, we are not required as homeschoolers to school a certain number of days. Since public schools are in session for 180 days, we plan for 180 days. You’ll want to check with your state to see if there is a requirement for the number of school days.
Determine what kind of school schedule you want to set
Do you want to have a traditional school schedule with three months off for summer? Would you rather be a modified year round and only take one month off for the summer and more breaks during the year? You might want to be completely year round and take one or two weeks off several times a year. Perhaps you like the idea of schooling for four days a week. Determine what schedule works best for you.
Decide when you’ll take vacation days
I mark these down first and then back track either direction to see when my start day and end days for the year will be. Some people like to take the entire month of December off for Christmas plus a week off for spring break. I tend to be skimpy on my vacation days. I take a few weeks off for Christmas and a few days off for Thanksgiving. You may have a big family trip slated for the fall. Be sure to mark that down along with holidays.
Mark down your school days and total them up
I like to get a month total, then a semester total, then the yearly total. If you come up short on school days, you’ll know that you either have to give up vacation days, or start earlier or end later.
Why I took a picture of this hot mess and didn’t wait to make up a nicer one shows you my impatience. I wanted to hurry up and get this blog post out while I had the time!
As you can see, I marked off my vacation days in purple and highlighted the school days in orange. I put my co-op days in green as those are school days, but we don’t do any other school work on those days. I’ll get to the purple circles in a bit. You can see by all the scribbles that I do a lot of tweaking and changing while I plan!
Make your schedule work for you
This is your schedule and no one else’s. Set it up so that it works best for your family. You’ll notice that I have certain days in each month circled in purple. Those are my “mental health days”. Two years ago, I decided to give myself one day a month off of school. I called it a “mental health Monday,” This was not designed to be a spa day for me, or a “put up my feet and relax” day. Those Mondays were simply days that I did not have to teach. I could use that time to catch up on other parts of life; meal planning, laundry, etc. It was a huge game changer for me.
I liked the idea so much that last year I made sure we had at least two days off every month. It was gold. My kids liked it and I loved it. I never felt burned out from school using this schedule. It did mean we had to start the school year earlier than most (in July), but it was worth it. I actually like starting the year off earlier. That way our school year is well under way by the time we add in a lot of the extras (co-op, homeschool PE, high school Discipleship, etc.).
Okay, so get busy on your super simple homeschool calendar planning and let me know how it goes!
If you’d like some free organizational printables, you can check out these posts: