I’ve heard all the reasons why you don’t want to spend time planning your homeschool year.
“I’m spontaneous. I just wanna do whatever I want to do” “Planning is not worth it. You can make all these plans and it doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to happen.”
I’ve heard it all, but today I’ve got three reasons why planning your homeschool year is actually well worth your time. We worry that we’re going to put in all this effort, that all of our planning is going to be for naught because life can happen and our plans can change. If your homeschool plans aren’t working, it could be you simply haven’t planned in the right way.
Homeschool Planning Saves You Time And Stress
The first thing I want you to know is there is a particular way to create plans for your homeschool that will make your life easier and will not cause more stress for you.
The reality is, we have to teach something, to fill those hours of the day with our kids. At the most basic level, we have to have something to do. You can either spend a little bit of extra time in the summer planning for it, or you can be scrambling each and every week to do it on the weekends before the homeschool week starts.
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Don’t Spend Your Weekends Planning
I think too many people spend their weekends trying to figure things out for the week ahead. What happens is that homeschooling becomes kind a drudgery, because you’re spending so much of your weekend doing it and don’t have the time to relax and recuperate.
I have always preferred to get into planning mode in the summer. I set aside a little bit of time and get it done. It’s kind of like cleaning out the garage or cleaning out the closet. You start it and you try to get it finished, and then you just check it off the list. It’s very much the same kind of process.
Getting your homeschool planning done in the summer means you don’t spend your precious time during the school year worrying about planning.
What Homeschool Planning Is NOT
We need to get to the heart of what homeschool planning really is.
First, let’s address what homeschool planning is not. Homeschool planning is not deciding in June that on the 23rd of September at 9:00 AM, I’m going to be doing this lesson in math. That is not what homeschool planning is. You could do it that way, but that is definitely not going to work, as something will happen to throw off that schedule.
Planning Eliminates Decision Fatigue
One aspect of homeschool planning is that it helps eliminate the need to make decisions on the fly.
Good homeschool planning is about eliminating as much decision fatigue as possible. When you get in the heat of homeschooling your kids each day, you have to constantly make decisions.
It’s been said that the average human makes approximately 30,000 decisions a day, unless you’re a mom. I think, if you’re a mom, you’ve got to make your own 30,000 plus another 20,000 for each of your kids, because goodness knows they’re not making all of them. The nature of motherhood is an exponential amount of decision making everyday.
Decision fatigue is real. It’s the mental weight that weighs us down when it comes to homeschooling. Creating a homeschool plan is about eliminating as much decision fatigue as possible.
The best homeschool planning results in you knowing when it’s time to do the next thing, exactly what to do.
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Creating A Realistic Homeschool Plan
Homeschool planning needs to accommodate your good and bad days. The best way to do this is to plan for the average.
Too often, we create this optimistic homeschool plan, only planning for the good days. We also then worry about how to achieve our homeschool plan we’ve created when we have bad days, i.e. a child gets sick, we get sick, the washer overflows, etc.
The secret is to create your homeschool plan for the normal, average days. These are the days when you’re looking around at nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, and think, “Let’s do a science lesson, which one are we going to do?” Having a plan means you pull out the science lesson that you’ve prepared and you’re ready to go. This is the kind of homeschool planning that you do to eliminate decision fatigue and, and be ready to go when those normal days happen.
Put Your Homeschool Year On Auto Pilot
We teach you how to do all of this in Put Your Homeschool Year on Autopilot. We help you have a manageable, peaceful, and enjoyable way to plan your homeschool this year. Whether you’ve already started homeschooling or plan to in the near future, the success of your plan (and your sanity) rests heavily on how you create your homeschool plan.
This type of homeschool plan allows you to be a friend to yourself. When you’re doing your homeschool planning, you are also answering the question “How can I take care of future me?” Your entire family benefits.
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