 Hey everybody, welcome to Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video, we are going to be chatting about how to plan your home school year. I'm going to tell you my steps. I'm gonna take you through them one at a time. Everything that I do to plan my year, why I only do this and nothing more. And I am going to be sharing a freebie that you all have been asking for for a long time. So get yourself a drink, get cozy and let's chat planning. All right, so step one of my home school planning is to start with our goals. How do I know what I want out of the home school year if I don't know what I want out of the home school year? So the first thing I do is I start with whatever I want her to achieve by the end of that year. Now we are curriculum dabblers and resource users. We do not use a box curriculum. We do not use anything from like lesson one to lesson 180. And because of that, I kind of need to know what I want her to achieve. So that I can make sure we're achieving it. So what I do is I get a piece of paper. I go through a books like home learning year by year as well as the core knowledge, what your whatever grader needs to know books. I go through our stay standards and some other things. And I will make a list of what I want to see her accomplish in that upcoming school year. So for instance, for fourth grade, I know for a fact that I want to make sure that she is experimenting more with writing different styles and different types of writing. And so I have written those out. I want her to be able to write letters. I want her to be able to write reports. I want her to be able to, you know, write different styles of writing. So those are things that I have written out for her for goals that I want us to make. And that's where I start because unless I have those goals, none of the rest of these will really work. Now I've had a lot of you ask me over the years if I would share our goals with you. And I would love to do that. The problem with that is much like any homeschool kid Emily is not like a fourth grader straight across the board. So she is ahead in all things language and a little, I'm not gonna say behind, but not quite as far ahead in all things math. So while I absolutely love these books, like love, love, love, I find I am normally pulling the language from one year and the math from another. And that is totally okay. Every homeschooler, every kiddo is right where they need to be. And we just need to be able to accept that and, you know, accommodate them. So what I have done instead is I have created a grade level skill checklist free before you. So you can grab these. I will put the link to these in the description box. And it goes through preschool through high school. High school is more of just an idea, but preschool through eighth grade and tells you exactly the skills that they should know or that, you know, you might want them to know for language arts and math. And then I have also included a blank checklist which is what I will be using this year where you can actually fill in. So if you have a kid like Emily who is going to be, you know, maybe language from one grade and math from the other, you can go ahead and fill in whatever fits them. And I say that because if you have a preschooler and you're looking through the preschool list and you're like, okay, it recognizes names and primary colors check, matches shapes and objects check. Maybe you only have two things off of the preschool list. Well, write those down and then go to the next list, right? And just do that so that you're constantly progressing in your homeschool and you constantly have something to work towards. The reason I do this is because it allows me to use things other than curriculum. It allows me to use games, hands on resources, subscription boxes, books, all of these things that we use in our homeschool anyway. And it allows me to check off those goals that I have for her. So for instance, let me give you an example here. For fourth grade, one of the things here is identify the main events of the plot and discuss character traits and motivations. Now, I could totally use a curriculum for that or we could just use read alouds. And because I know that's a goal as we're reading aloud, I could say, hey, what are the main events of this book? What's the plot? Who are the main characters? Let's talk about their traits. And we could just have a natural discussion over a read aloud we're already doing without me having to have a curriculum or worksheets or something that she's gonna fight me on. So I can make that a lot easier for her. And I'm hoping that these checklists will do that for you because it will give you that peace of mind as a homeschool mom to know that you're getting to what you need to be getting to, but also knowing that you can homeschool with the freedom of not necessarily needing something that maybe your kid doesn't love. Not that your kid has to love everything, but it does make homeschooling a little bit easier. So anyway, that is my step one. My step one is to write down our goals for the homeschool year. I mainly only write down our language arts and math goals and then I will have a kind of like chat with Emily. Do you know any topics you would like to learn about this year? So she'll give me a list of topics that she would like to learn about and then I'll start kind of exploring those. And by exploring, I mean gently. Like I only do one. So I know for sure we're doing an astronomy unit when the school starts back, but that's it. All the rest of her ideas are written down as ideas. I am not diving deep into those because well, they could change at any minute. Step two, now that I have my goals, we sit down as a family and we pick our one thing. Now every school year for as long as I can remember, I got the idea from Abby rooted in rest. We pick one thing and that one thing is something that we want to focus on. Either we want to focus on making it a habit in our homeschool or we want to focus on doing it more in our homeschool. So some of the things that we've picked over the course of our homeschool journey has been read aloud and the year that we picked out we got really good at it. And what you'll find if you pick one thing is that it finds a way of weaving itself into your homeschool so that the next year, it's kind of become a habit, right? It's got its place. It's found its own little way to fit in. So then when you add another one thing, you're just finding a way to do that on top of it. It's not like you're doing away with the thing from the year before. So read alouds became a staple. And then the next year I picked games. I wanted gameschooling to become an important part of our homeschool so we make those a priority. I make that one thing, the thing that we really focus on. Like not that nothing else matters but we really try hard to work towards that one thing. We've done nature study, we've done art. We've just done a ton of things, poetry, tea time one year. And that was probably one of our favorite years because we did a lot of poetry, tea times. And then they found their natural place in our homeschool. Well this year, I'm gonna go ahead and tell you guys, our one thing is experiences or field trips. Not that we didn't have a place for those before but after almost two years of being stuck in our house and not being able to do any experiences or field trip, we have noticed that that is the one thing that is missing in our homeschool. We love them and enjoyed them and depended on them so much more than we realized. So we unanimously, when I asked, hey guys, what are we gonna do for our one thing? We unanimously agreed going places, doing things, field trips, experiences and that was hands down going to be our priority this year. So get ready for a ton of learning on location videos because we are going to be going, going, going all year long. Step three, so now that I have our goals set, now that I know what our one thing is, I inventory the shelves. So I go through, I don't do anything other than inventory. I go through based off of my goals and I look at our game shelves and our book shelves and the storage shelves in my homeschool office and I'm like, okay, here are my goals. Do I have resources on hand to meet these goals? Cause if we're not gonna necessarily use a specific curriculum for each of it, I need to make sure we have resources. Some of it might be curriculum, some of it might be games, some of it might be books but I need to have things to teach it, things to help her learn it. So I just go through, okay, do we have resources for this? These were some of the things she was interested in or the most interested in. Do we have resources for this? And I just inventory what we have, what I have to work with. And then that also kind of rolls me in to step four, which is making a list of the things that I don't have resources for so that I can use this prime time to shop for them because we have back to school sales, we have prime day, we have the buy to get the third free at Target and Amazon. I mean, this is just the best time to get the best deals. So I inventory first, make a list of the things that we necessarily don't have anything to cover or things I feel like are lacking and then I start shopping those sales. So that's step three and four combined. And obviously that is why you have seen so many halls this summer because I have been able to share those with you, which I haven't done in years before because I didn't know how much you guys love them, but I've been sharing all those things as they've been rolling in. So okay, here's some of the things that I got for this. So you guys know writing is a priority because I got a lot of things for that and I want us to start focusing on all operations of math because I got a lot of games for that. So you can kind of see where I want to work with Emily just based off of the resources that we've already brought into our home school because those are the things that I know will be helpful. We also sit down while we're talking about resources and we discuss our subscription boxes and subscription letters. Which ones do we get? Which ones do we like? Which ones do we want to continue? Which ones do we want to add based off of things that we know we're going to be doing in our home school or focusing on? And so for instance, Kevin has already decided he wants to add a few, which I will be sharing with you soon, but he wants to age some of them up as he's teaching to her. So he's chosen a few different ones to add this year. So that's part of that process too. Inventory on what's on the home school shelves and then finding resources that are gonna help us and aid us in homeschooling the next year. And then steps three and four brings us to step five. So we have inventoryed the shelves, we have bought a ton of new resources and now it is time to purge the old resources because where on earth are we going to put all of the new stuff that we purchased? And if you have watched my hauls and you have seen our office and homeschool room tour, you know we are at maximum capacity. So it is time to purge. Now this I will say is the one time that homeschooling an only child is easier because I don't have to hold on to anything that's below her. I don't have siblings or other children that are gonna move into that. So anything that I'm like, okay, she's passed this, I can just set it aside. For instance, some swamp. Love it, but she's passed that. I can just get rid of that game. I don't have to hold on to it for younger kiddos. So if you are a multi-child homeschool, I will say that is probably something that is more difficult because you have to hold on to stuff for younger kids and find a way to grow with your older kids. And I don't envy that because I like my resources. I like having a tons of things on hand to teach her. But we are definitely at maximum capacity. So the next thing we're gonna have to do is purge. Now we have not done this step yet. This is the step that we are currently at in our homeschool planning. I have already made our goals. I have already inventoried. I have already purchased. I have not purged yet. And I am not looking forward to it, but it is necessary or else. I'm not gonna have anywhere to put everything. So that is the step I'm currently at. And I definitely recommend you doing it before the school year starts so that you have the peace of mind of this clean, clear space, whether it's a closet, whether it's your dining room, an actual homeschool room, your office, wherever it is. If it's clean and tidy, it will make you feel better. Step six, and the kind of a last step that I do is I look at our routine. Our routine from the previous years. And I evaluate whether that routine is still going to work going into this next homeschool year. Now I say routine because we do not do a schedule. We are not schedule people. We have a flow to our days. And our flow kind of just starts whenever we start. So whether we wake up at 10 o'clock in the morning or 2 p.m. in the afternoon, we just flow to the next thing. We wake up, we do our morning, we have a slow start to our days, always a slow start. And then we do our morning basket and then we move to table time and then we do a learning lunch and then we have an afternoon activity. So that's kind of what our day looks like in the past. And I'll explain each of those things. So we have a very slow start. I tend to strew something in the mornings so that Emily will wake up and explore or discover and well, leave me alone because I'm not a morning person. So I will leave something out for her. Sometimes she engages with it. Sometimes she chooses to do something else, but I try to leave something out for her to do while I am waking up, caffeinating and becoming a human. And then one time a human, we roll into our morning time. Morning time is sometimes just me and her. Sometimes it's me, her and Kevin. And we just sit on the couches and start going through our morning basket a little bit at a time. We almost always will read aloud while she's doing something with her hands. And then we will do some sort of mad libs or trivia and then we play a game. Now, this past year, we would take our game to the table so that our game at the end of morning basket easily rolled into table time because we were already at the table. And now our table time is anything that requires more like full focus, things that require her to write, things that require me to teach, lesson type of things. Sometimes it's just playing a game, but it's things that require us to be sitting at a table to do them. So writing for a unit study, playing a game for language arts, doing teaching textbooks for math, things like that. Anything that needs to be done at a table. And I call it table time, even though sometimes it happens anywhere, but a table, it can be outside in the car, et cetera, but we just kind of always call it table time. It's more of our structured learning. And then after that we would have a learning lunch and that is when everybody goes through separate corners because well, when you are a family that works at home and you're together 24 seven, you need a break. So we will all either put in, put on our headphones, we will watch a show, we will listen to podcasts, listen to audio books. Emily will sometimes do her own thing completely and she'll listen to an audio book or watch a show of her own while we do something else. We'll do chores, we'll catch up on things, whatever we need to do, but it's completely separate, our own alone time. And she normally does some sort of learning. So like I said, audio book, podcast, educational show, documentary type thing. And then we would move into an afternoon activity. Our afternoon activities could be poetry, tea time and nature walk, playing games as a family, a movie night, I mean, afternoon classes, if she had like an online class, it could kind of just be any sort of activity. Now I will say, while I haven't completely evaluated this year from start to finish, I do know that we are probably going to shift things a little bit. I have a feeling our table time is going to shift until after lunch. I think we're gonna flip flop those two because as we have the freedom and our nights are getting later and later and as Emily's getting older and sleeping a little bit longer, I think that's just gonna be necessary. We haven't sat down and talked about it. Like I said, we haven't got to that step yet, but I do think that's what we're gonna do. I think our routine or our flow is going to end up becoming a slow start to our days, morning basket, lunch, table time and then our afternoon activity, afternoon slash evening activity. We will see, I will keep you guys updated but that's kind of what I'm expecting to happen is that it flows a little differently. It's kind of flip flop. But for the most part, we still get to those major categories no matter what order they're happening in. Now this is pretty much all of the planning that I do at the back to school year. Like this is it. This is what I do to get us ready. I don't plan any more than this because if I do plan more than this and ask me how I know this is gonna happen, we are going to scrap it. Either she is going to take off like a rocket and learn three quarters of the goals that I made or three quarters of the things that I had set for us or she's gonna change her mind on what she's interested in or a life is gonna happen, this amazing experience or field triple pop-up that we can take, something is going to come up to throw a wrench in my plans. So this is it. These are the steps that I make. This is what I plan for back to school. This is it. Now I have a pretty good idea of what the start of our school year is gonna look like in my head. Like I'm kind of like, okay, these are the things that we're probably gonna do but I don't write them down and I don't make any plans for them because again, anything can happen to throw a wrench in that. So what I do is I just keep those in my head, keep kind of a running list of things that I think we're gonna do and that's it. This is all I do. Now I will say that this year I'm hoping to come on here every term, quarter, semester, whatever word you wanna use to keep you more updated in real time of what's going on in our home school. So normally in years past I've done a, like beginning of our school year curriculum choices, mid year update and end of the year update. This year I'm hoping to come on every six to 12 weeks to tell you guys this is what's going on, this is what's working, this is what's not working, this is what I'm planning to do, these are the classes we're taking, this is the resources we're using, et cetera because I want you to see kind of more in real time what we're doing versus me giving you this big broad plan of what I hope we'll do and then it's not getting to it. I'm a little tired of doing that with you guys. So you're gonna get a much more realistic look, little by little into our home school this year and I hope that that is something you'll enjoy. Now I would love it if you would leave your steps for planning your home school year in the comments. We all home school just a little bit differently, we all plan just a little bit differently and your steps may help somebody out. So please leave your steps to planning your home school in the comments and don't forget to head over to the link in the description box if you think it would be helpful to grab your free grade level checklist to help out with your planning this year.