Planning guide
How to plan a homeschool year
Count the days before you count the lessons, and plan for the week everybody gets the flu.
Most homeschool year plans are written in August, from the front of each book forward: lesson 1 on the first Monday, lesson 2 on Tuesday, and so on until the books run out. By the middle of October that plan is three weeks behind, and nobody can say whether the math book will be finished by June.
The fix is to plan in the other direction. Decide how many school days you have, then fit each curriculum into those days. It takes an afternoon with a calendar and the table of contents of every book you own, and it tells you in August what you would otherwise find out in April.
Start with the calendar, not the books
Pick a first day and a last day. Then take out every week you already know you won't do school: Thanksgiving week, two weeks at Christmas, a spring break, the week of the family wedding. What is left is your school year in weeks.
A common shape is 36 weeks. At five days a week that is 180 school days; at four days it is 144. That gap of 36 days is bigger than most people expect, and it is the single biggest decision in the plan, so make it on purpose.
Many states use a number of days or hours as their yardstick, and they differ a lot. Some ask for 180 days, some for hours, some for nothing at all. Check your own state's rule before you settle on a number, and plan a few days over it.
Decide which days are school days
Next, mark the weekdays you will teach. A family with a Tuesday co-op often does home lessons Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. A family with a part-time job in the house might do four long days and keep Friday for errands and library trips.
Write down your own days off now as well: the dentist, the week grandparents visit, the day the baby is due. Every day you take out in August is a day that can't surprise you later.
If you belong to a co-op, see how to plan homeschool lessons around co-op days. A long co-op day and a one-hour class need very different treatment.
Count what each curriculum holds
Now open each book's table of contents and count the work in it, including the parts that are easy to forget: tests, reviews and investigations each take a day too.
- Saxon Math 6/5 (3rd edition): 120 lessons, 12 investigations and 23 tests. Count each as a day and that is 155 days of math.
- Teaching Textbooks Math 5: 114 lessons and 16 quizzes, so 130 days.
- Math-U-See Alpha: 30 lessons, taught to mastery. Most families spend about a week on each, so about 30 weeks.
- Story of the World, Volume 4: 42 chapters. At four sittings a chapter (our estimate, not the publisher's) that is 168 sittings.
These numbers come from each publisher's own scope and sequence or a retailer's listing. Count your edition yourself if you can; editions change.
Divide, and look at what doesn't fit
Divide each curriculum's total by the school days you have for it. That gives you a pace: how much to do each day.
Take Saxon 6/5 on a four-day week. 155 days of math into 144 school days does not fit. You are 11 days short, which is about three weeks of a four-day schedule. You have four honest choices: do math five days a week for part of the year, double up on some lighter days (two short review lessons, or a test plus a lesson), start a few weeks earlier, or let math run into the summer.
Story of the World on a four-day week is a bigger gap. 168 sittings at four a week is 42 weeks, six more than a 36-week year. Here the better answer is usually to change the shape of the work: three sittings a chapter instead of four, or reading and narration only for a few chapters. That is a decision to make in August, not in May.
Some books fit with room to spare. Teaching Textbooks 5 at 130 days leaves 14 free days on a 144-day year. Leave that slack where it is; you will need it.
Leave slack on purpose
Plan the work into fewer weeks than you have. If your calendar holds 36 weeks, plan the books to finish in 34. The two spare weeks absorb a stomach bug, a move, a new baby or a week when everyone needs a break, without anything slipping past June.
Slack is cheaper at the end of the year than spread through it. A week left open in May can take whatever went wrong in October, November and February together.
Decide now what you'll do when a day goes wrong
A day will go wrong in the first two weeks. Decide in advance which of these you will reach for, because each has a different cost:
- Catch up on a free day: do the missed lesson on Saturday or another non-school day. Nothing moves, but you lose a day off.
- Double up: do it on the next school day as well as that day's work. Good for short lessons, hard on long ones.
- Spread it: add a little to each of the coming days. The finish date holds and no single day gets heavy.
- Push it back: keep the pace and let everything move a day. The easiest choice, and the one that quietly costs you June.
The trap is to push back every time without looking at the finish date. Three pushes a month is a month by spring.
Let something else do the arithmetic
Everything above is division and a calendar, and it has to be done again every time the year changes shape. CircleUp Planner does that part. You give it your school days, your days off and each child's curriculum; it knows the lesson, test and chapter counts of over 200 curricula and levels, lays the work across your days, and tells you whether each book fits.
When a day goes wrong you tap "didn't get to it" and pick catch up, double up, spread or push back. Before you pick, it shows the finish date each choice gives you, so the cost of pushing back is in front of you rather than discovered in April.
Either way, with a planner or a paper calendar, do the counting first. Then read how to pace homeschool curriculum for books that don't come in neat daily lessons.
Frequently asked questions
How many days is a homeschool year?
It depends on your state. 180 days is a common reference point, but some states count hours instead and some set no number. Check your state's homeschool law, then plan a few days above whatever it asks for so a bad week doesn't put you under.
Do we have to finish every book by the end of the year?
No. Many families carry a math book into the next year and start the next level when this one is done. What matters is knowing early, so it is a choice and not a surprise. Plan each book's finish date in August and look at it once a month.
Should I plan the whole year at once or one term at a time?
Count the whole year at once, so you know whether each book fits. Plan the details a term or a few weeks at a time. A daily plan written in August for April will be wrong by then; the totals will not.
What if we start in the middle of the year?
Start from today instead of the first of September. Count the school days from your start to your end date, subtract what is already done in each book, and divide what is left. The method is the same; the numbers are smaller.