How to plan and organize your school year by weeks or months?

[Bk4]

I have 4:  a Kinder (she will be 6), 2nd grader, preschooler (she will be 5 later this school yr), & then a 6 month old baby (teething! =)) in all this mix. 

 

Curriculum: Singapore/daily, SOTW+Veritas Press mixed with it/twice a week, Writing with Ease, FLL/daily, & Brave Writer/once a week (Friday poetry & story journaling).  Nature study once a week.  The K and preschooler  I will be focusing on phonics/reading, math, and they like to participate in the Fridays too. We do a lot of reading in this house, and will continue with some great realouds incorporated too; that I'm still deciding on.

 

I have never had a good system for planning and organizing our year week by week as before we just spent our days doing a ton of reading, playing, nature, and math.  I want a better system for this year. I just bought these roller drawers that will hold things for each child. 

 

  I am looking for some ideas to map out my weeks for the year. I love to be organized and want a good guide to show my weeks for this school year. 

 

What works for you? Tell me how you map out your school year.  I haven't liked the planners I have seen out there, so not sure if I should set up my own notebook, make my own excel sheet of weeks?  I would love to hear from  you all, especially of multiples at home, what worked for organizing your weeks?  I always like to add in our events/appt for the week and meals too.

 

Go! I'm ready to hear your systems of organization! =)

[Saddlemomma]

We use TOG for 4 classes: history, geography, literature, and worldview. In addition to that, we have Horizon's Math 6, Philosophy Adventures, Latin, IEW Fix-It Grammar, Killgallon's Grammar for Middle School, Jump In, and beginning Apologetics.

 

For TOG, I print out the appropriate weekly thread sheets for each class and highlight the options we want to pursue.  I then list them with checkboxes on Onenote for that week.  For the rest of the classes, I will move to the next lesson or chapter and record what needs to be done with checkboxes on our Onenote weekly pages under the appropriate classes as well.  As DD works that week, she checks off what has been completed.

[SemiSweet]

I use OneNote, I have a folder for each child and a page for each week. I put weekly goals in a column on the left and daily tasks with checkboxes in a column on the right. I have a lot of open and go curricula so I really just list out weekly goals every Sunday for the upcoming week. It allows me a lot of freedom and flexibility while still having some structure and plans.

[bluedarling]

I plan out several weeks at a time (using a Word document with a table and day numbers across the top, and resources down the page...one document per subject.)  Last year I did 6-week "paces" and we took a short break after each "pace".  This year I went ahead and planned an entire semester, and will go back to giving it to them weekly.  It helps me to plan ahead and see the big picture of what I planned, but I did find we slipped a bit in weekly accountability, so this year I'm just giving them a week at a time...and it allows me to adjust things before I give it to them.  If I give them too much at once and something isn't working, then we have multiple "plans" floating around adding to the confusion.)  This year since my kids are older, they'll be writing their "checklists" into a planner, because I want them to learn to plan out their schoolwork more as they are reaching ages of taking outside classes. 

 

I wouldn't worry with that at your kids' ages, though.  Any plans are just for you at this point.  My advice is to keep things as simple as possible.  If you spend too much time planning out a detailed schedule, the plans will change!  Especially with littles.  A weekly plan would probably be better than daily plans for you.  Don't get too tied to your plans, though.  At those ages it would be best to go at their pace, and adjust your plans.  But it does help me to have a "big picture" of what I planned.

 

I've tried computerized planners over the years, and found myself devoting more time to it than it was worth.  Keep it simple!!

[jenslp]

We plan for 180 days of work that we can complete whenever, but we don't check off that day's work until everything listed for that day is completed.  That way, some days we may not get to everything but we know what we have to finish up the next day.  It works better for us than planning by weeks or months because then we can do school whatever days we want as long as we get the 180 days of work done in the year.  So then I basically make these computer spreadsheets that we print out that show the days in the rows and the subjects in the columns and there are 180 rows.  For subjects that will be completed every day like math, the column says math all the way down.  Some subjects we alternate days and some every couple of days.  It's easy to just create whatever pattern we want for each subject and the program can fill in the column the rest of the way down.  Then it makes planning easier because I can look to see that for history, we just do it every other day, so that would be 90 days total.  So I look at my history curriculum and divide it up by 90 so I know what to do each day.  It sounds complicated but it actually only took me one day to plan the whole year this way and for us it works really really well.  My son can just look at the chart for a day and know exactly which subjects he is supposed to do that day, then as long as he does all of them I can check off that day from the 180 days.  It also allows him to get done early in the year if he wants or to stretch it out further if he needs.

[SkateLeft]

I use OneNote and Excel. I plan out 36 weeks of stuff in Excel, then on the weekend, I copy over the next week's information into OneNote. I have a separate OneNote notebooks for each kid.

[sweetpea3829]

I create a weekly schedule in Word.  One page for Language Arts, and then for math, I have my oldest on one side of a page and the 2nd oldest on the other side.  

The schedule has the days of the week across the top, and then the subject areas down the side.  So for LA, the schedule is split into group grammar, group spelling, group writing, group reading, independent grammar, independent spelling, and so on. 

 

The math schedule is split into Math lesson, spiral review (or facts drill, depending on the kid and grade level), word problems, logic.

 

Each student has two weeks worth of daily folders.  In their folders, I put all work that they are to complete independently, along with an assignment sheet that lists off other things I want them to accomplish (for example, DS' sheet might instruct him to read certain pages in his Beast Academy student book).  

 

Every night, I take out the next day's folder...go through each kid's folder and make sure consumables are placed into a dry erase pocket (so we can reuse), and write down the next day's assignments.  At the start of each day, they grab that day's folder and work on independent work while waiting for their own specific 1:1 or group lessons with me.  

 

As they complete each piece of independent work, they file it in their "Finished Work Folder" and we review that at the end of each day.  They make corrections as needed.

 

Typically, I plan in 8 week chunks.  When lesson planning, I write down all of the worksheets they'll be doing during that 8 week block.  I write it down on the schedule I made in Word.  I file each worksheet in a pocket folder which is in a 3-ring binder with the coordinating week's schedule.  I put them in order...Monday's work first, then Tuesday's, etc.  This makes it easy to just grab the pocket folder, sort the work into the correct day and go from there.  

 

It sounds like a lot of work and, at first, it was.  But it's totally made things a lot easier around here in the long run.  

[jaderbee]

I have 4: a Kinder (she will be 6), 2nd grader, preschooler (she will be 5 later this school yr), & then a 6 month old baby (teething! =)) in all this mix.

 

Curriculum: Singapore/daily, SOTW+Veritas Press mixed with it/twice a week, Writing with Ease, FLL/daily, & Brave Writer/once a week (Friday poetry & story journaling). Nature study once a week. The K and preschooler I will be focusing on phonics/reading, math, and they like to participate in the Fridays too. We do a lot of reading in this house, and will continue with some great realouds incorporated too; that I'm still deciding on.

 

I have never had a good system for planning and organizing our year week by week as before we just spent our days doing a ton of reading, playing, nature, and math. I want a better system for this year. I just bought these roller drawers that will hold things for each child.

 

I am looking for some ideas to map out my weeks for the year. I love to be organized and want a good guide to show my weeks for this school year.

 

What works for you? Tell me how you map out your school year. I haven't liked the planners I have seen out there, so not sure if I should set up my own notebook, make my own excel sheet of weeks? I would love to hear from you all, especially of multiples at home, what worked for organizing your weeks? I always like to add in our events/appt for the week and meals too.

 

Go! I'm ready to hear your systems of organization! =)

I organize by weeks. But the last two years I was weird about it. New topics/books had to start on Monday and topics/books had to be finished on a Friday. I've dropped that this year. :) I also tried scheduling out history by the day this year. That was an eye opener! I had well over 190 days of history planned for a 36 week year. Yikes!

Anyhow, Merry at Hope for Homeschool's blog is a great help in organizing lesson plans, scheduling and planning: http://www.hopeforhomeschool.blogspot.com/2012/08/organization-teacher-binder.html I used her teacher binder idea last year and will again this year.

[Sherry in OH]

For each subject, I look at the number of lessons (pages if resource is not divided by lessons) I plan to complete and divide that by the number of weeks I intend to use that resource.  The result is the portion of the resource we need to complete each week to stay on track.  

 

I reevaluate and adjust quarterly.  My plans include a few flex weeks.  If we get behind, these weeks are available for catching up.  If we don’t need the extra time, we take a longer Christmas break and finish earlier in May.

[73349]

I use a Google spreadsheet. Unlike with a paper planner, I don't worry about plans changing--it's so easy to make adjustments if I need to--so I plan far in advance, working on it in bits and pieces when I feel like it. It's like having a boxed curriculum, but tailored to us. I plan by the week.

 

Normally I have certain subjects on certain days, but a weekly plan for what gets finished gives me a little more flexibility.

[ChrissySC]

When they are younger, by weeks is the best.  As they get older, you might as well set down each day.  They "get lost"  or "can't figure it out" or "thought they did it".  Trust me, those 12-14 yos can come up with more excuses.  Mine is now suddenly "overwhelmed" by a week's work.  LOL

[coffeegal]

I use a filing system. All loose papers are filed, assignment sheets, tests, anything I'll need through out the year. It's kept us on track for a couple years now despite all types of last minute surprises. Here's the post I wrote about it: http://classicallyhomeschooling.com/simple-filing-system/

 

:001_smile:

[AdventuresinHomeschooling]

I do history and science in 6 week chunks at a time throughout the year so I can make adjustments and tie things into holidays etc.  I plan corresponding literature and projects with this.  We do math and grammar and those type of subjects as pick up where you left off.

[MrsRobinson]

Last year I tried to plan everything for the week on Sun evening. That quickly failed, as I was too tired from the busy weekend to motivate myself to do it. This year, I made my own planner and am planning lessons 6 weeks at a time so I don't have to do it so often, but i can reevaluate our pace and progress, etc. Hope you find what works for you!

[Mrs. A]

You might be interested in looking at this planning ebook. I haven't bought the book (yet), but I did download some of the free planning worksheets awhile back and have found them to be VERY helpful because there are lots of options so that I can do it just how I want. Another plus to having lots of options is that something you haven't thought of before might strike you and turn out to be the best way for your particular situation. 

[winoelle]

I use excel spreadsheets, each week has two sheets and each quarter is it's own workbook. On each sheet I have the days of the week across the top and the subjects down the side. I put room on the bottom of the first sheet for library books I need to request and on the second sheet for supplies I might need. This is my third attempt at my own planner and has worked well for two years now. I ptint it out each quarter and put it in my binder. I need a paper copy to work with, but like being able to add and switch things around without endless erasing.

[Halcyon]

I use a Google spreadsheet. Unlike with a paper planner, I don't worry about plans changing--it's so easy to make adjustments if I need to--so I plan far in advance, working on it in bits and pieces when I feel like it. It's like having a boxed curriculum, but tailored to us. I plan by the week.

 

Normally I have certain subjects on certain days, but a weekly plan for what gets finished gives me a little more flexibility.

 

 

This is superb. I am going to copy you, if you don't mind :D.

 

Can you tell me, what books are you using for World Religions? WONF? What does that stand for?

[Halcyon]

Last year I tried to plan everything for the week on Sun evening. That quickly failed, as I was too tired from the busy weekend to motivate myself to do it. This year, I made my own planner and am planning lessons 6 weeks at a time so I don't have to do it so often, but i can reevaluate our pace and progress, etc. Hope you find what works for you!

 

 

I did the same thing. Lasted about a month LOL. I am going to plan 6 weeks out, too--when I tried a whole year, or even a whole semester, we quickly got off track. Sometimes older hit a challenging spot in math and needed to spend more time there, or I decide younger needs to step back and work on his multiplication tables for a week.

[73349]

This is superb. I am going to copy you, if you don't mind :D.

 

Can you tell me, what books are you using for World Religions? WONF? What does that stand for?

 

Copy all you like. :)

 

WONF is World of New Friends. It's free at http://www.smuuchurch.org/uploads/pdf/RE/World%20of%20New%20Friends.pdf but I'm going to have to figure out how to adapt it for a single student. I have some library books planned, too:

• What do you believe?
• The fantastic adventures of Krishna
• Buddhism (Nardo)
• Muhammad (Demi)
• Islam (Raatma)
• Buddha (Demi)
• Buddha stories (Demi)
• The song of Francis
• Saint Francis and the Wolf
• Christianity (Nardo)
• What you will see inside a Catholic church
• The Vatican and other Christian holy places
• Mother Teresa: Friend of the Poor
• Judaism (Rosinsky)
• Chanukah (Rau)
• The Apostles' Creed (Biffi)

[My3girls]

I'm trying the 36 week folder thing this year.

[Bk4]

^{Thank you for all the great suggestions! I wrote down a lot of these.  It sounds like a common workable theme is planning in chunks at a time versus daily, semester, whole yr., etc...} 

[Hunter]

Planning Your Mission Statement

http://harvestministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/TWGHW2-CH1-FINDING_YOUR_MISSION.pdf

 

Yearly Planning

 

I spend less money when I use the above yearly planner. A LOT less.