How to Plan a Yearly Homeschool Schedule that Works for Your Family - Part 2

Have you decided on the months of the year that you are going to homeschool? If not, please read part one of this article, please do this now as it will help to get you started in your homeschool planning for the year.

Have you factored in your vacations, holiday times, and summer break? You now need to break down the rest of the year to determine your weeks and days, for each month. You can always set up your homeschool schedule for the year and work your vacations and such around that. You are not limited to how you plan for your school year. This is one of the nice things about homeschooling.

Now that you have the number of months that you will be homeschooling, take your required number of days by your state and divide it by the number of months. For this example I will be using the standard of most states, which is 180 days. Let#s say that you have 8 months available to homeschool. You are taking 3 months off in the summer and one month off in the winter.

180 days divided by 8 months equals 22.2. This is the number of days per month that you would need to provide instruction, according to law, for your children. Here is another example, lets say you want to homeschool all year and only take 2 weeks off for whatever reason. You would then take 180 days and divide that by 11.5 months and you would get approximately 16 days per month in which you would need to homeschool, again according to law.

You are not limited to just 180 days of instruction, or whatever the minimum is for your state. You can homeschool 365 days a year, if you choose to. Now that you know how many days per month you need to provide instruction to your children, you can figure out your weekly schedule.

In the first example above, you would need to provide instruction about five and a half days a week. You can figure this out by taking the amount of days required per month and dividing that by 4 weeks. 22.2 divided by 4 equals 5.5. In the second example above you would need to provide instruction about 4 days a week. Or, you could choose to homeschool 6 days per week for 2 weeks, then the next week only 4 days and you could then take the rest of the month off.

I hope you can see how flexible your homeschool schedule can be. Your next step will be to sit down and mark the days you are planning to homeschool each week, for the entire year on your calendar. This is very important to do, as it sets a basic schedule for you to adhere to. However, don't let this make you feel locked-in to this schedule. You are always free to change things up, its your schedule to do with what you will. As long as you are providing instruction for the amount of days required by your state, you will be just fine.