There are so many ways to go about planning out a school year but this is the easiest way I have found for me to do this as we don’t use any one site or curriculum. I am usually gathering materials and ideas throughout the year so I try to jot them down or put them in a special place until I am ready to sit down and plan out what we would like to use.

This year I used the ‘Arts of a Balanced Home Education’ List from Brightly Beaming Resources as a guide for helping me to plan… it went along well with a lot of the Charlotte Mason ideas I have been trying to implement in our routines.

We had a couple of rainy days when I couldn’t work outside so I gathered all the materials I had planned to use and separated them into piles by subjects and then I sat down to look at each area and jot down some notes. I also grabbed my computer so I could look through some of the things I already had because I have a TON of resources saved as digital files.

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Then I jotted down the goals and ideas I had for each area before looking through the materials. This way I could find materials that went along with our goals or ‘themes’ for the year. This kept me a little more organized and helped me to choose between similar items.

Here is the scratchpad that I used as I went…

It wasn’t the neatest or most organized but I went ahead and made up a new one on the computer to use. It is much neater and better organized and I thought it might help you with your planning as well. I have printed out an extra so that I can start writing in things as I come across them for the next year.

I use the Notes section to write in websites or starting points for courses that we may have already been using. I can also write in if I need to find the book or anything else that I need to remember to do.

I added spaces to write in what grade level these resources were for but you could always do a separate set for each child. We do a lot of group work so it just made more sense for me to have everything listed together.

The number of lessons helps me to decide how many times this needs to be done a week so that I can add it to the Daily Routine or Loop Schedule.

The Credits help me when I am putting the courses into the Homeschool Manager app. It will calculate the credits for the transcripts when they graduate… so nice!

I also added a Morning Basket planning sheet as we do like to incorporate a few things into our Morning Routine and this will help me to see if I am getting too many things added to it.

Once you have your notes situated you can look over them to make sure you aren’t oversheduling or underscheduling any areas. I like to use a highlighter to show my final choices as well when I have written in several options for a subject.

I hope this helps someone as I know it helps me! It will definitely be a little neater than what I was doing before.

Happy Planning!

Keep an eye out for the Homeschool Notebook post that should be out soon… we used notebooks before and then we switched to binders but I think we will be using notebooks again.