Mapping Out a Years Homeschool Curriculum

Many homeschoolers get stressed out over scheduling homeschool days. They fear they will fall behind if they don't stick to a rigid schedule. They fear they are being unproductive if they don't finish a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. This fear can be paralyzing and actually make progress difficult.

There are many options for planning out your school year. Some parents like special online homeschool trackers and planners. Others like workboxes , where they place the work to do be done for the day in a box so the child can take ownership over getting their work done. P ersonally, I like to take a week or so during the summer to plan out the entire school year. While it sounds like an arduous task, it is a good way to set up everything you want the child to learn for the school year and also to help them stay on track.

The first step to setting up a year's curriculum is to determine how many lesson days the child will have during the school year. By law in most states, a homeschooler must have 180 days of instruction each school year. That doesn't mean that every single day must be spent doing work at a table. Personally, my kids take at least 1 day a week for their elective classes, which also count as school. There is also an additional ½ day each week spent on drama Club and other activities that also count as school. With that said, I know that my kids need to spend 120 school days on seat work, 40 of which will be half days (taking into account that there are approximately 40 weeks in a school year). So, some subjects will be studied 4 days a week (math, Language Arts), and some subjects will be studied 3 days a week (science, social studies, foreign language).

The next thing you have to do is look at the textbook or curriculum to see how many lessons is in the program. As an example, let's look at Exploring Creation with General Science , a popular christian science curriculum. By opening the book to the table of contents, you will find that there are 16 modules to be completed in a school year. This will automatically tell you that you will want the the child to complete approximately 2 modules each month. Each module consists of 3-4 experiments, reading assignments, and a study guide, for which you can give a test. In my case, we would do six 90 minute lessons for each unit. Three to four of these lessons would include reading and an experiment. Two to three lessons would include reading and reviewing the study guide. The final lesson would include taking a test and discussing answers. After mapping out the first module, I would continue mapping out each modules into six lessons each for the entire year. I would of course, do the same for each subject.

So you see that by determining how many work days you will have for the school year, and determining how many chapters or lessons are in a textbook, you can easily map out a subject for the entire school year.