Planning ahead is absolutely vital for the success of your homeschool session. Start with printing out a blank calendar for the academic year. Fix the dates that you are going to begin and end the academic session for your homeschool students. Mark the main holidays and count the number of days available.
Now make a couple of photo copies of this calendar so that each child’s schedule may be individually marked.Then make a master calendar for yourself as the homeschool parent giving tasks that need to be done in order for preparing for the children’s classes. Time consuming but well worth the effort.
Next pick out the curriculum you will be using for each of your homeschool students. This is important because it takes time to find the best one for each child as well as having the books delivered. However once this step is done with a major chunk of the planning is taken care of. Most curriculum will include the schedule for learning for the subjects.
Move on to making a list of goals that need to be met for each homeschool student. These could include specific academic goals, as well as general life goals such as teaching them to cook, clean, tie their shoe laces, and be more independent. Put everything they need to learn this upcoming year onto the list.
Create notebooks for each child. Decide if you want individual notebooks for different subjects or if you would rather use a five subjects in one type of notebook. The choice may differ for each homeschooling student based on the grade he or she is in. It will also depend on how much writing work they do as opposed to worksheets and projects.
Go through the study material and make lists of printed material that needs to be photocopied, as well as read alouds that may need to be printed out and made available to the homeschool students. Organize these handouts as per student, and subject. Put them into different folders and have them ready for the upcoming academic session. Now that you have done the basic prep, sit back and wait for the fun to begin.
