Planning a Year's Homeschool Curriculum so a Child Can Follow It

I recently presented tips for Mapping Out a Year's Homeschool Curriculum. The key to mapping out a year's curriculum is to determine how many work days you will have for the school year, and determining how many chapters or lessons are in a textbook, to determine how much work must be completed each day. Depending on your schedule and the child's extra curricular activities, you will break a textbook for homeschool program into 120 to 180 lessons. Once that is done, you need to compile this information is a way that makes sense to the child so they can easily follow it.

Workboxes work well for the younger child, especially if they don't read yet. You simply get a box or crate, and every day, you can put the lessons that have been planned out for the day in the crate. You would only have to the guideline you have pre-set for the year to see what to load into the child's crate for the day.

As the child get's older, you may want to move to a system that doesn't require that you spend 30 minutes each day gathering books and activities. You can instead put all of their books and activities on one shelf, and type our a page for each day letting them know what they need to gather and complete. This can be done once a week. The child will have the option (within reason) of moving ahead or catching up if they get behind, just as long as they finish their work for the week.

As homeschooled children enter into their high school years, you may want to give them even more control over pacing themselves to complete their work for the school year. In the lower high school years (grades 9 and 10) I utilized Google Calendar, to load in all of their lessons for the entire year. They were free to do extra work if they anticipated and activity or event that might put them off track. They could also work on weekends to catch up if an unexpected event put them behind.

The most mature homeschool students in their Junior and Senior years don't need nearly as much hand-holding. It is enough for the parent to map out the number of lessons for the school year and just hand out that information over to the student. If this is overwhelming, the parent can put each individual lesson on an index card and give the child a box of index cards for each lesson. They can pull the card, complete the work, and place the card in the back of the box with other completed work. They will need to know how many lessons they have total so they can pace themselves throughout the school year.