How to Schedule a Homeschool Week

Homeschooling is a great journey where you learn alongside your children. It offers flexibility and truly tailored education for your children. And for this journey to be a successful one it is good to plan ahead the route you want to take and stops you’d like to make.

I have already talked a little about choosing your style and curriculum in this post so have a look. Here I would like to share with you our weekly schedule, so you can see for yourself that planning could be quite simple.

Having a weekly schedule is a blessing for you and your children. We are all creatures of habits and routines bring us structure and balance.

Establishing a Time Framework

While the traditional school week averages around 6.5 hours per day for 5 days over approximately 38 weeks a year, homeschooling offers the flexibility to create a tailored learning experience. Rather than replicating every minute of a school day, establishing a framework can help organise and prioritise learning in a way that suits your family.

In our homeschooling journey, for instance, each day starts at 8:30 AM and concludes at 4:00 PM. This structured timeframe not only provides a sense of routine but also serves as a guide for planning and navigating the week ahead. Your day could start later or earlier and by embracing a personalized schedule, homeschooling becomes a journey that aligns with your family’s unique needs and rhythms.

Creating a Weekly Overview

Why even bother with planning when life seems to have its own agenda?? Well, let me tell you from experience: the magic often lies in the plan. Without a roadmap, intentions tend to slip away, overshadowed by the routine tasks, household chores, and the myriad of unexpected distractions. From personal experience, I’ve seen that unplanned goals risk fading into the background. But here’s a truth: planning helps bring an action to completion!

Choosing the right core subjects is like selecting the building blocks of your homeschool journey. For our family, these are: English, Maths, History and Sciences which are standard subjects taught at schools. I also add languages, catechism, art and nature studies. In our plan, there is time to practice intruments, read aloud and do extra projects.

English and Maths take center stage, serving as the foundation for each day. These subjects, known for their depth are scheduled in the morning when enthusiasm and focus are at their peak. For a closer look of how we teach them look at the bootom picture.

Following this intensive session, we transition into the languages, infusing movement into the learning process. Be it singing songs, reading humorous poems, or engaging in lively games, this block adds some twist to our academic day. On Wednesday, you see, we have time for Picture Study, which often happens in the comfort of our sofa!

A well-deserved break comes next, granting the boys a breath of fresh air before we come back for an afternoon session. Here, history, science, and geography unfold, sometimes delving into captivating projects that breathe life into the textbooks.

Project time is scheduled at the end of the school day after reading-aloud time. This allows for extra time to finish off or do some extra bits. But generally speaking, reading aloud and project time is interchangeable. If we have a project related to the lesson we are doing, of course, we will do it straight away and move the reading time to later. This is usually the case with Geography as the curriculum we use is an art project based. With other subjects, we don’t always end with specific projects and then the end-of-the-day project time is for computer sciences and IT skills. Boys make games in Scratch, learn to type, to do Blender or prepare movie animations.

If you want to know more about our curriculum choices have a look here.

There are a few extracurricular activities not included in my weekly plan. These are afternoon swimming, football and music lessons as well as a book club once a month.

Friday Fun

Now Friday is different in my family. My goal was to make it more fun to keep the love of learning. There is no Maths or English, but I scheduled creative writing where boys write all sorts of pieces from their imagination. I have added a specific catechism class to learn the basics of our faith and we go on a nature walk (weather allowing…)

Most Fridays we meet up with our homeschool group for Drama and fun but if this is not the case we spend time immersing ourselves in my native language.

Beyond the Weekly Framework

As we embrace this weekly schedule, it’s crucial to remember that it’s not an inflexible mandate but rather a versatile framework. Homeschooling, for us, extends beyond textbooks and structured hours. We’re fortunate to be part of an incredible homeschool group with which we do extra meet-ups and field trips.

Education extends far beyond the pages of a book and flourishes when nurtured within a supportive community. The magic unfolds when we learn and grow together!

Closing Thoughts

In my homeschool schedule, each subject, theme, and project finds its rightful place, creating a learning that adapts to the rhythm of our family’s educational journey.

In preparing your homeschool weekly schedule, remember it is but a guide, not a stringent rulebook. The true enchantment of homeschooling lies in the unfolding of a unique journey, one that is beautifully tailored to the rhythms and nuances of your family’s life. You’ll have to decide which kind of homeschool schedules and routines are right for you. The day can be shortened, more time given to a specific subject, you can decide your core subjects are different then mine. Or you can choose to work with blocks of time and projects rather than subjects.

Put the framework that suits best your family’s needs and as you navigate each day, cherish the unexpected twists, and the moments of discovery that breathe life into learning.