How to Home School Your Child - Planning Your School Day

Planning your school day is important. You want to give yourself a basic idea of how you want to run each day from the start. This way you have a general plan and you can feel more organized. While flexibility is a great benefit of homeschooling, it is important that your child have some structure.

Determining Daily Schedule

Before you can plan your day, you have to generally plan your calendar for the year. Get a wall calendar that you can use for just homeschooling. Start by marking the first day of your homeschooling year then decide the last day you of school for the year and mark that too. Go through the calendar and mark through any days you know you will not be schooling. You may want to factor in additional days as “maybe” days, to make up for time missed from sickness or other unforeseen complications with the schedule. 

Once you have your basic year planned, you can determine how many hours per day you need to home school. Count up how many days you will be homeschooling for the year. Divide the number of hours you need for school according to state guidelines by the number of days you will be schooling. This will tell you how many hours per day you must spend in school activities.

The calendar will also come in handy when you begin to schedule school field trips. It can also be part of your record keeping for what days and hours you home school for the year and help you stay on track so that you get enough hours in. 

Once you know how many hours you will be schooling per day, you can create a basic schedule. Homeschooling’s biggest advantage is flexibility. Do not feel that you have to stick to a strict schedule. This is a general guideline as to how you will spend each day. Every day will be different, and that’s perfectly okay but having a general idea of how you want to break up the day will help.

For example, if you are going to school for four hours per day, you may want to break up your schedule into half hour increments, one half hour for each subject. If a subject takes longer than the allotted time, simply make up the work the next day for the subject missed. The great thing about breaking up the day into eight segments is that you will have an allotted time for every subject being taught, including “electives.” This way if you have to take extra time on a core subject, you can simply put off the elective lessons as they are usually less essential.

This is an excerpt from the book How to Home School Your Child: Developing a Well Trained Mind: Proven Strategies for Unlocking Your Child’s Genius with Homeschooling by Karina Bartlett

 

You can get the book on this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NAX3506/