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. Last year, I made a large scale scope and sequence for reference. This should help me keep Arthur and Quentin straight as I dive in each year.

Back around April, I started with making a simple list of of the various curriculum we will be using. I definitely watch the sales to grab curriculum I know we want at the best price. And we are now recycling curriculum from Arthur’s previous years for Quentin’s current year. That definitely helps for our bottom line.

I’m a big fan of time blocking, but we have multiple events outside of our house to account for. This coming year, we have our STEAM coop, chemistry class, and weekly nature explorers/nature hikes. My first pass at scheduling our day began with the outside items. From there, I came up with this basic schedule. Note that I built in Flex Time for our coop related field trips. None are scheduled yet, but I know the committee is working on three trips a month. Our tentative date is Tuesday so I built in some open time. We can shift Tuesday’s plan to Wednesday if we have a field trip that week.

Next, I broke the week schedule down into days to better see if everything would fit. Arthur’s schedule is set and I am still tweaking Quentin’s schedule. I primarily use Roam to accomplish my day to day planning. This is our basic weekly template of blocks. I can easily copy and paste this into each week’s page for easy planning. I only need to modify as special events pop onto our calendar (e.g. dentist appointments, special activity).

I then broke down each day’s blocks. I don’t go back to these pages very often, but I do like to write everything out to make sure.

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 always end up shifting some weeks to take advantage of the calendar and/or align with the other kid’s schedule. For example, I moved Arthur’s reading of Ramayana to coincide with Quentin’s week that includes covering ancient India and the Ramayana story.

I usually buy a paper planner as my brain really likes the act of writing things down to commit to memory. I grabbed this new planner to try out after hearing about it from many homeschool bloggers. I like the amount of space available and the fact that it’s undated. My biggest complaint right now is that the month pages and weekly pages are completely separated from each other. We’ll see how this one goes for basic planning and reference. On second thought, I also do not like the binding. I would prefer spiral bound for each of opening and laying flat. I could cut off the binding and make it a spiral bound, but that might be too much work for any benefit.

My last big planning step is to create very detailed lesson plans including videos, books, and details. This will be my third year using a special note talking app called Roam. I’ve been actively using Roam 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. This screenshot is the start of our first week.

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 second week of August. Starting August 14th, 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: