Making Up Your Homeschool Planner
Making Up Your Homeschool Planner
Future homeschooling parents: Have you made up your homeschool planner yet? What's a homeschool planner, you ask? Exactly what it sounds like. It's your organizer that helps you keep track of a couple of important things: A) What you're accomplishing in getting supplies,, and B) what you're putting on the homeschool calendar.
Let's take a look at some things you need to include in your homeschool planner.
1) A checklist of state requirements. One of the most critical things for you to do before you ever hold your first class with your children is to find out what your state's laws are regarding homeschooling. Each state is different, and some are more strict than others. You can never use someone in another state as a reference for what will be required of you. The requirements in each state are too different from one another. Some states, for instance, will demand that you file a curriculum schedule as well as attendance records before the start of the school year. These things might affect how you structure your year--and hence, the rest of your planner.
Which brings us to the calendar, an important part of your homeschool calendar. There are two structures that are most commonly used for the calendar section of the planner. The first is the School Year Mimic. This basically makes it so that your homeschool time mimics that of the public schools. So if your school works Monday to Friday from 7:30 to 3, then you adopt that schedule for your children's schooling. Likewise, whatever holidays the public students get off, so too do your kids.
There are several advantages to using the School Year Mimic Calendar.
* Your kids will be out the same time and days as other kids in the neighborhood.
* You will have the summers off so your kids can play with other kids.
* It will be easier to take summer vacation.
* This is similar to the time structure of the majority of careers and jobs.
* This is the structure used by many homeschool curricula.
Some disadvantages of using the Mimic Calendar include:
* There's very little room for flexibility
* Kids will often be forced to work at times when they're not receptive
* There's the very real possibility of burnout for both parent and student.
The other form of calendar you might prefer to use for your planner and your homeschool system is the Homeschool through the Year Calendar. This simply means that studies are ongoing throughout the year. Some of the benefits to this calendar include:
* It provides a more relaxed schedule for the students and parent
* There is more flexibility for illness, vacations, etc.
* It allows the possibility of three day weekends.
And the disadvantages:
* Your kids' "off" days will not correspond with neighborhood kids'.
* Kids may feel deprived of a summer vacation that other kids get.
Whichever method you use, make sure that you keep your homeschool planner
with ongoing activities, such as field trips and weekly projects. This way, the planner will be your ultimate tool for planning every day of your school year.I suggest reading homeschool magazines that will help you understand homeschooling better.
