Our Schedule

So now I have the supplies, it’s time to start planning and gathering everything I want to do. I’m a Type A planner that always feels better with a good plan going in. I’m always up for flexibility and change in the spur of the moment, but I need a plan to reference when things change. I started with making a simple list of of the various curriculum we will be using.

I’m a big fan of time blocking, but we have the added complications of Quentin’s preschool curriculum, our new STEAM coop, and our weekly field trips. My first pass at scheduling our day began with these three items. From there, I came up with this basic schedule:

From there, I broke the week schedule down into days to better see if everything would fit:

My next step was to create an overview calendar with our big themes. I used index cards cut into smaller pieces laid out on my desk so I could see everything at once and move things around. Very low tech solution, but sometimes paper really is better.

I’ve been experimenting with the idea of loop scheduling to help Arthur stay on task while I work with Quentin. I made a very long and detailed week loop (on the left) for myself and a much simpler daily/weekly loop (on the right) for Arthur to check off. We’ll try this out and see how it goes for the first few weeks.

From here, I pulled out my trusty cheap paper planner and started jotting down basic plans for the week. I love to make things easy to see at a glance, so I color coded all the different subjects. in case you are wondering:

• Pink is ELA

• Purple is math

• Orange is history

• Light green is Quentin’s preschool

• Light blue is music/art (not on this spread)

• Dark blue is coop/science

• Red is field trips/games/crafts.

Because there was too much to shove onto the small lines of my paper planner, I pulled out Quentin’s curriculum onto a separate paper planner sheet. This has helped me wrap my brain around all the different activities that I’m hoping to accomplish during one-on-one time with Q.

My last big planning step is to create very detailed lesson plans including videos, books, and details. Last year, I started in August with just a simple Pages document. Sometime in the late fall, J downloaded and started using a special note talking app called Roam. He really loved it and turned me onto using the system. I’ve been actively using Roam since January to collect all my notes, lesson plans, scheduling, and other miscellaneous items. (Also, you can see from the sidebar that I use Roam for a wide range of projects, not just homeschooling.) I’m still exploring the various tools on Roam and I’m sure that my planning with get more advanced and efficient as this year goes on.

And that’s it! My planning and scheduling process seems very complicate but most of it is prep work before the year begins. Once we start, I mainly use the paper planner as reference and work inside Roam for the day-to-day planning. As usual, I tweak the process as I go along but this is my starting place.

We’re officially starting our homeschool adventure the first week of August. Starting August 9th, I’ll post a weekly wrap-up. I hope to do weekly updates highlighting our highs and lows on this journey.

Next up on the TBR pile: