There’s a trick to homeschool planning without actually planning.

Well, sort of without planning, anyway.  With this method, you won’t be planning individual days.

How Can Homeschool Planning NOT Involve Planning?

The “trick” is pretty simple, actually: you plan a routine.  Just like creating a household routine — rather than a schedule — tends to work better for many of us who share a certain thinking/processing style, so creating a homeschool routine — rather than a schedule — can be less overwhelming for many.

See, when you plan out your whole year in advance, with all the lessons written into your planner all nice and neat, that usually lasts about 2 days.  (A week if you’re really good.)

And then something happens.  Someone is sick.  Or breaks a bone and has to be taken to the E.R.  Or the water line to the house breaks and floods half of your house.

In short, life happens.  And all of your beautifully-laid plans have to be scratched out (or erased) and done all over again.  (Never, ever, ever plot out your whole homeschool year at this day-by-day level in ink!)

But you don’t want to be figuring out all over again every week what you need to do.  So a great middle ground is to have a basic routine — I like to refer to mine as my “framework” — that you know you’re using over and over again every week.

What Does That Look Like?

Some of you right about now are going, “That sounds great, but what in the world do you mean by a ‘framework'”?  I’m glad you asked. 🙂  Just as an example, here’s what the framework might look like in a given year for one of my elementary-aged children:

Every day: Analyze a sentence (KISS Grammar)
1 lesson from Ray’s (except on Wednesdays)
Monday: new Grapevine Studies lesson (review for the rest of the week)
Tuesday:
Wednesday (errand day): math drills
Thursday:
Friday: art appreciation lesson

Now, we use unit studies, so I know that we fill in around these with our unit work, which is sufficiently “random” (that is, different from one unit to the next) that I can’t put it in a weekly plan.  If you’re using something more structured, you would probably put all of your subjects into this same plan, though.

The basic idea is that this is simple a cheat sheet of what the “next thing” is for any given day. Then all you need to know is that you do the “next thing.”

Do you need to know what lesson number you’re going to be on, on a specific day 112 days in the future?  Or do you just need to know that (for the most part) you’re going to do one math lesson per day, every school day, and each one is going be the lesson that immediately follows the one you just finished in the book?

There Are Options

Now, if you feel more comfortable, you can write in daily plans using this, a week or a month or so at a time.  But filling out a schedule should be easier with the framework in front of you.  And simultaneously less necessary. It offers some structure – but also flexibility.