Plan Your Home Education Year: Year-to-View to Daily Routines

Home Education offers a unique opportunity to tailor your child’s learning experience, but it can also feel overwhelming when trying to plan everything you want to get done. With so many moving parts, it’s helpful to have a structured plan in place.

This blog post will guide you through a three step top-down approach from organising your year to view to defining your weekly schedule to crafting daily routines. Plan your home education year with me today.

But First! If you are still on the fence about Home Education or just have some reservations then perhaps you want to check out my answers to some of the most Frequently Asked Questions about Home Education in the UK.

If you have decided to Home Educate your children this year then a helpful first step before doing any planning can be to identify and recorded Your Why for Home Education. There are many reasons why families choose to Home Educate and defining your personal why can provide clarity and direction on this educational journey.

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Before I get into the 3 steps to planning your year I want to let you know that first off we school during the academic year from Sepetember to June and do not school year round like some other families, we are a secular home educating family and we do not follow any specific home schooling style, we are eclectic in our approach.

With all that said these tips can be useful for any family so lets get planning!

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Step 1: Plan your Home Education Year-to-View

The first step in the top-down approach to planning your Home Education year is to organise your year from a very high level perspective of when you will be teaching / learning and when you will be having a break / holiday.

In the UK we do not have a set number of days that we are required to Home Educate however if you are in the US or another country you need to check your country or state requirements.

My personal choice is to school during the academic year and to take the same holidays as the public schools. This is my own preference as we have friends and family that public school and we like to spend time with them during the breaks.

For this step you will need:

• A year to view academic calendar (you can download the one I used for free from CalendarPedia)
• Two erasable highlighters; one for teaching weeks and one for breaks
• Dates for the breaks you want to take during the year

Simply highlight the days and weeks you plan to take as breaks or holidays and then highlight with a different colour the weeks you plan to teach. I aim to do between 36 and 38 weeks teaching a year. Sometimes I will add a note to the left hand column of the weeks in blocks before each break to help me with fitting in our unit studies for the year.

Now you have your year broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks we can look at creating a weekly schedule.

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Step 2: Develop a Weekly Schedule

Having Home Education Routines and Schedules in place, even very loose ones, can be helpful in giving your week structure and allowing everyone in the household to have an overview of what to expect for the week.

For this step you will need:

• A list of the topics you want to teach, the frequency you want them covered each week, if they are part of a loop schedule and how long you think each one will take daily
• Information concerning any weekly classes or events you will be attending
• A weekly schedule chart – either create your own with pen and paper or download my freebie
• Some coloured erasable pens – it can be fun to colour code your core and loop subjects

Here are the steps for organising your week:

• First thing you need to be aware of are any days you will be out of the house at meet ups, forest schools or sports and then any classes you will be taking whether in person or online. These are the weekly factors that cannot be moved or missed.
• Then decide how many days a week you will be at home doing core subjects. Some families school all year round and so have shorter school weeks of 3 or 4 days a week, while other families set aside a set day every week for outside events, fields trips or hands on learning.
• Pick the Core Subjects such as maths, english and reading that you want your children to do with an approximate daily time and how frequently you want them to do each of them. For example, if you are following a curriculum for Maths or English you can simply see how many lessons there are for the year and divide that by the number of weeks you will be teaching for. The reason I say an approximate time is that some topics will take longer on different days or you may follow the rule that once the time is up you stop and move on.
• Choose any topics or unit studies that you want do to either weekly or on a loop schedule.
• Leave time for enrichment activities such as music, art and exercise.
• Add all of these to your weekly chart

Try to leave room for flexibility. Home Educating offers the unique advantage of adaptability, so don’t hesitate to adjust your weekly plans if your child needs more time on a particular topic or if a learning opportunity arises that wasn’t in the plan.

When I first started Home Educating I thought we had to fill 6 hours a day 5 days a week but now I know that Educating at Home does not have to look like Public School. That is just one of the things I wish I had known when I started Home Educating.

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Step 3: Craft Daily Routines

With your weekly schedule in place, you can now focus on the specifics of daily routine planning. Here’s some tips:

• Use a Block Schedule: Organise your day into blocks of time and create a basic daily framework as shown below dedicated to specific sections of your day.

• Schedule in Everything: Household chores, self-care and time for meals
• For Lessons Start with the Essentials: Begin each day by focusing on the most important subjects or the areas where your child needs the most support. This ensures that these essential lessons are completed even if the day doesn’t go as planned.
• Integrate Different Learning Styles: Consider your child’s learning style when planning daily lessons. Incorporate a mix of visual, auditory, and hands-on activities to keep your child engaged and to reinforce learning.
• Leave Room for Exploration: Allow some time in the day for exploration and self-directed learning. Whether it’s a topic that sparks your child’s interest or a project that takes learning in a new direction, this time can be incredibly valuable for fostering a love of learning.

Once you create a basic daily framework specific to your family you can then create each routine that hangs off that framework such as the morning routine shown above.

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Final Thoughts

Planning your home education year from the top down—from the year to view to daily routines —provides a clear, structured approach that can help you stay organised. While the process requires thoughtful planning and regular adjustments, it also offers the flexibility to tailor education to your child’s unique needs and interests. Remember, home education is a journey, and each year will bring new challenges and triumphs.

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I hope this guide has provided you with a clear roadmap for planning your year. Do you have any specific questions or need help with a particular part of the process? Feel free to ask!