Scheduling and Record-Keeping
Ways to Organize Your Homeschool Day
Flexible Daily List - No Schedule
Each day you and your child can make a list, maybe on a white board on the fridge, with their goals for that day. This can be done first thing in the morning, or the evening of the day before. The list is changeable, with no mandatory order or time length.
Example #1
math
reading
writing
ancient history
Example #2
science experiment
cooking
art project
reading
The child checks off what is done, in no particular order. Anything that doesn’t get done can go on the next day’s list.
Student-Centered Schedule
Using the child’s choices and interests, this schedule is created by the student with the parent’s help. It is open-ended or flexible whenever possible. The schedule may be needed for just a few activities, and can grow or change with the child’s desires and age.
Example:
classes at a learning center (such as Different Directions or Brooklyn Apple Academy)
theater for kids (such as Pied Piper or Firebird)
science lectures (such as astronomy at American Museum of Natural History)
Music jam session
At-home project designed by the student (writing, art, science, etc.), and self-designed multidisciplinary projects such as making a mini-book about famous astronomers or writing a mini-musical.
Different Types of Weekly Schedules:
Standard-Style School Schedule
Standard school schedules from 9am to 3pm can vary. In this schedule, math and English happen for one hour every day, while social studies and science each have two-hour periods twice a week. Physical education, art and music fall into the “afterschool” category, happening after 3pm.
My kids started in school before homeschooling. One of the things they liked least about school was the set time for classes. My oldest told me that you’d know in the first five or ten minutes if you’d be bored for the entire hour, or else the bell would interrupt you just as things were getting interesting. For this reason, I chose a child-led schedule where my kid set the pace, rather than a set schedule similar to school.
Thematic Teaching-Style School Schedule
Thematic teaching centers around a chosen topic or interest, such as animals or pets. Here, two days a week are “science days” devoted to math and science, and two days are ”humanities days” devoted to language arts and social studies; the fifth day is reserved for field trips. On a science day, students can learn the math in the morning necessary to accurately record that afternoon's science research or experiment. Or math and science could be combined throughout the day. Music is a logical additional for a science/math day. On a “humanities day,” students could read an historical novel in the morning, and in the afternoon examine documents, photographs and background facts. Visual art (examining art from the period or illustrating their reading and writing) can enhance a day of language arts and history. Field trips may encompass all subjects, including phys. ed. and the arts, and can be related to the topics of study.
Homeschool Free-Style Schedule
I did not stick to exact hours or times of day. When my kids were small, they were up very early and went to bed early. As my children grew, they needed more sleep as teens, and their day might start at ten am or even later, while their bedtime got later and later. We started our day whenever it was the right time for them. In my early years of homeschooling, we left phys. ed. for the afternoons, but eventually I realized it belonged at the start of the day, to wake up their bodies and their minds. After a period of physical activity, they were ready to sit still for a while.
Early morning:
physical. education (indoors this might be 20 minutes of yoga or dancing to videos or music, or it could be an hour of outdoor walking, skateboarding or biking, or it could be an online class. My youngest loved dance and martial arts, and took extra weekly classes in the evenings.
Between breakfast and lunch:
All seated tasks involving pen (or pencil) and paper, all subjects covered in two to three hours each day.
Afternoons:
Special projects, field trips, extra reading, selected classes or sports. My kids designed and made elaborate projects, like making costumes and cardboard swords to act out a medieval scene. All these activities related to their learning. Screen time was limited while unstructured, creative play was encouraged.
With this free-style schedule, more learning happened outside the home, and much was applied and experienced in different settings.
I recommend asking your kids what their ideal daily schedule would be!
Unschooler’s Schedule
An unschooler's schedule might be created as the day happens, with no plans other than the child's project-in-progress. This allows for great flexibility. As interests and opportunities appear, new directions in learning can occur unplanned.
Projects can take more or less time than originally thought, and new projects may get started in a moment. Student and p parent can document the learning process by making notes on a scheduling template (see below) or taking photos and adding captions and dates. Most activities and projects contain multiple subjects. For example, going birdwatching and building a birdhouse to feed local wildlife will include science, physical education (lots of walking in birdwatching), arts & crafts (designing and building the birdhouse), math (measuring, budget cost, noting time of day to look for birds or when they feed, and more), geography (migration and habitat), reading (about birds) and writing (keeping track of birds the student identified).
Weekly Scheduling Templates
I learned the hard way (through error) that it was easier to write our schedule AFTER the fact, instead of planning a schedule and trying to stick to it. I created blank templates for a weekly time period. Along the top were the days of the week, and above that the child’s name and dates of that week. Along the side was a list of required subjects.
At the end of the day, or maybe during midday, either parent or child could note down what was done. The boxes were small, so we used the intitials of book titles and added page numbers, or made other abbreviations. When we did a field trip to, say, the American Museum of Natural History, I wrote AMNH down the column, knowing that every subject would be covered. That evening or the next day, I’d (briefly) add the galleries visited or activities they did (such as “Einstein” when we spent the day at an exhibit on the famous scientist).
When it came time for me to write the quarterly reports, I took the weekly templates that we’d filled in, and stapled them together. I had 12 sheets of paper, with each subject in the same row on each sheet. I could quickly flip through the pages and write up each subject. This saved me time and space. (It was so much better than keeping an entire page every day for each kid, which is how I started.)
Below is the template I created for myself, available for free download. Print it at home, as needed.
Homeschool Schedule Template BLANK - use this one for planning (see below)
Using the Templates for Team Planning
At the beginning of each year, I would take a blank weekly template and sit down with each kid for a one-on-one planning session. The spaces for subjects along the left side are purposely kept blank just for this process. We took turns to fill in those boxes.
I asked my child, “What’s your favorite subject? The one that’s most important to you?” My youngest loved oceans and whales, so he always put science first. Then it was my turn. I love reading and writing, so I put down Language Arts in the second row. Then it was his turn again. Dance and martial arts were a close second to his love of whales, so phys. ed. went into the next box. Then I had a turn again, and chose social studies or history. Then he chose math.
At the very bottom of the column was foreign language. We didn't dislike it, but something had to come last. In one high school year, my son suddenly decided to double up on his science and take an AP course along with his science internship. I asked him where he was going to find the hours. We went back to the planning template and saw that foreign language was at the bottom. This made it a short discussion. We agreed to study his chosen language over the summer, and took a leap in science that year. Doing the planning together at the start of the year made it much easier to amend the page when it needed to be changed.
I kept the planning template and copied that for the year for each child. It was helpful to me every time I looked at it, because it reminded me what my kid enjoyed most, with his favorite subject always at the top!
