Homeschool Planning: A Year at a Glance
- shoalseer
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
So you've decided to homeschool? Welcome! It can be a beautiful life filled with family memories and exciting learning opportunities, but it can also be hard to know where to start. Check out these tips for getting a plan in place to start your year off strong!
Hi!
I'm Jessie!
If you are new here I am a second generation homeschool mom to four kids, a small business owner, a curriculum writer, and I love planning season. When I was a girl one of the most exciting times of the year was when we shopped for school supplies. I love the smell of a fresh notebook, sharpening new pencils, trying out new folders and all the learning that comes along with it. School was one of my favorite things and I wanted to bottle that beginning of the year energy. Even today I love to peruse all the new supplies and stock the SEER store with things that I know can add joy to anyone's classroom or homeschool experience.
All the tips I'm sharing in this series have been broken down into small chunks. What that means is that if you are a busy mom like me, you can do each step whenever you have just 30 minutes or an hour to sit down and complete the step.
Today's topic, looking at a broad overview of the year and planning the dates for your homeschool, might not take you very long, but if you need to start and stop that's ok too!
You need a few things to get started.
A 2025-2026 calendar
pens or pencils
a good highlighter (my favorite highlighters are the new ones that you can erase, but any old highlighter will do)
Some factors to consider before you get started:
School holidays for the schools in your area
A good thing to have on hand is a local school calendar if you are planning to follow the holidays that the school takes, or a federal holiday calendar to factor in those days if you intend to take them off. In our homeschool, we do some of our best learning on days the schools are out.
Family Holidays!
When you are thinking about your school year, of course you are thinking about what works for your specific family. If you have special trips planned then you definitely want to factor that into your homeschool year.
Activities and Enrichment Classes or Camps
Most of us have some extracurricular activities that might factor into the schedule. If your child is doing cub scouts there might be camps or trips to factor in. If dance is a passion for your child then spring competitions might be something you consider before scheduling too many days in April in May. If your child plays sports that is something to consider. Think about these things as you get ready to pick dates.
Co-Op or Club schedules
Even if your child doesn’t have a regular class to consider, think about any co-op or club commitments you have. Co-Op’s often take up a full school day and that is something to consider when planning. Clubs can take up a lot of time as well.
Once you’ve looked at dates that might impact your schedule it’s time to get down to planning!
Step 1.
Decide how many days/weeks you want to homeschool
In some states that is mandated by the department of education in your state. Some states require that you homeschool a certain number of days and if that is the case for you that will factor into your decision. In my state, Alabama, we do not have attendance requirements so we usually base this decision off what works best for our family. This year we are going to do school for about 40 weeks of the year. Another factor in helping you decide how many days or weeks to do school might be if the curriculum you’ve chosen has a certain amount of weeks it has planned for you to take to complete it. If you don’t have a number in mind then it is ok to just decide to do 30 or 32 or 36 as a jumping off point for planning.
Step 2.
Get out your calendars!
In this step you want to get out your blank calendar, either from your planner or from a print out. If you have an undated planner that doesn’t have a yearly overview like this, we recommend printing one either on regular paper, or like we’ve done in the past, on blank sticker paper and pasting it into your planner!
When you sit down with your calendar print out, the first thing you might want to do is look at a holiday calendar and decide which dates you aren't going to homeschool. Consider all four of the important things we highlighted above that might impact your calendar. You can highlight those weeks or days using a separate color from the next step.
Step 3.
Once you've got your calendar filled out with dates you can’t or don’t want to school, and you have looked back at how many days or weeks you want to do school, it's time to fill out the calendar. Your number of weeks you want to do school can easily be divided into 4, 6, or 9 week chunks. Breaking it down into smaller chunks can help you keep everything straight and break further planning down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Go through the calendar using a different color of highlight than step 2 and highlight all the weeks you will be doing school. That’s your framework for everything else. If you miss a day here or there for something that’s ok, but having an idea of when to start and when you might finish can help you make all the other decisions!
If you don’t know when you want to start the school year, decide on an end date and work your way back from there until you hit the number of weeks you already planned on. The other way to do this is to pick a start date, either a traditional August or September date, or if you school year round like many of us, you might start in January or July. Put your weeks in from your start date and then you will be able to see when you might finish. For example we are going to start in July and end mid-May.
That’s it! That’s a great first step.
How do you get started with yearly planning? Do you plan or are you more of a chaos homeschooler? We’d love to know! Leave a comment below!
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