Around February each year, homeschool moms spend a lot of time planning high school courses.
Many moms may be feeling a little depressed because things are not going so well in their homeschool this year. They may be having “Grass Is Greener” syndrome where they look at other curricula, other families, and other students, and fall right in the middle of the comparison trap. They start questioning what they have been doing this year. Does this sound like you?
Analyze Your Current Status
Analyzing your homeschool system is actually a very good thing to do once a year but not to the extent where you fall into depression or a trap of feeling that you are not good enough. It is good to think through what your goals are and remind yourself what it is you’re trying to accomplish. If you need to write them down and look at them on paper, then do that. Once you have reminded yourself what your goals are then look at each of the pieces of curriculum that you have been using. Ask yourself does this curriculum meet the goals that I have for my student? Is the curriculum too hard for us? Is it too easy and do we need more challenges?
Taking a few minutes to analyze your current situation will help you decide if you need to research a new curriculum or stick with what you have. Just be very careful not to switch curricula or programs or co-ops or hybrids just because everyone else thinks it is popular. Even though it’s popular with everyone else, it may not be the right fit for you and your family.
How Will You Track Your Plan?
Once you have figured out what curriculum you are going to be doing for the next semester ahead then you need to figure out a system by which you can keep track of your plan and make sure that you are not getting behind and how you can accomplish the curriculum for that semester.
I developed a method when my kids were in elementary school that worked for us. We continued using this method all the way through high school with a few changes here and there. But, it still worked really well most of the time.
I used one quarterly planner checkoff sheet for each subject in my homeschool notebook, behind a tab for each student. I would plan out 9 weeks at a time. As each child did their work, I would cross it off in my notebook so that I knew we were on track and where we were in the book or program we were using for that subject.
How I Used The Quarterly Planner
So, let me talk you through how to use the worksheet.
For example, I’m going to use the Handwriting Without Tears workbook to demonstrate.
When my kids were little, we liked to use this curriculum to learn Handwriting. The pace that we used for handwriting practice was two pages a day so on my worksheet I would assign pages one and two on the first day of the week and then pages three and four on the next day and so on.
I would go down the page until I had assigned all of the pages for 9 weeks. I planned each class for each child in this same way and put all my planning sheets in my notebook.
And then when my child did their work I would cross it off in my planner. This way I could tell if we were on track or if we’d missed a day.
Teaching Independent Learning
Fast forward to when they reached middle school age – around 6th grade, I started transitioning them to independent learning. I would still plan out their assignments using this planning page, but now I would give them a copy and keep a copy for myself. The goal was to get them to look at the planner and cross off their assignments as they did them. In this way, they started to be responsible for their own learning and doing it independently without me telling them what to do that day.
By 7th grade, I started weekly meetings where we would meet together and plan out a week’s amount of work. This worked especially well for classes that we were taking outside of the home, like Classical Conversations or with our local coop. We would look at the assignments for the week and divide those up into daily assignments.
We’d write these into my student’s planner into columns for each day. And then THEY would use that planner as they did their assignments each day.
My goal for them was that they would learn to work independently and to be independent during high school.
What About YOU? Ready to plan homeschool high school courses?
And that’s it! That is the main method I used to plan out my high school classes for my kids each quarter, two times a semester. Sometimes I would come to a new quarter and realize that we were seriously behind and we needed to come up with a different system or a different curriculum because something was not working well. This helped me figure out how to stay on track and not get off derailed in accomplishing our goals.
What about you? Do you have a way to plan out your curriculum and keep track? What do you use?
If you liked this post and are interested in more information regarding planning homeschool high school courses, recordkeeping, keeping kids accountable, motivating teenagers, and planning for the high school transcript, then you might enjoy my “Your Homeschool Record-keeping Toolkit Course.” Click here to check it out and see if it might be something that would help you.
