Homeschooling: Planning for the New School Year

Proverbs 16:9 A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.

When the end of the current school year rolls around, I find myself looking ahead to plan for next school year. The curriculum catalogues begin arriving in the mail and thoughts of a new beginning and new school books begin dancing in my head.

What I have found, however, is that many times my best laid plans for the following school year end up getting changed as the year progresses. When I first started home-schooling I was not very flexible. I purchased this curriculum and, by George, we were going to use it and get through it one way or another! That hasn’t always turned out well.

We can plan and buy and begin to implement it all in the new school year, but sometimes the Lord changes our plans. Perhaps what we had in mind is too advanced or too easy for our child. Maybe it doesn’t fit with his or her learning style. Or maybe we just plain got too lofty in our expectations and planned way more than what could be accomplished in the time allotted.

Our circumstances often change too. Illness, injury or other family matters might come up that require a change in the schedule for either the short or the long term. The Lord directs our steps.

These detours are not what we planned and sometimes we get upset thinking we will fail in our mission that we set out on. If we can remember to think of these detours as being set up by the Lord, it will positively impact how we react to these things.

So the challenge is to schedule some flexibility into the school year, so that when we come to a detour that the Lord has set up for us, we can be flexible and meet the change in our schedule with grace and patience.

If you are planning for the new school year, have you scheduled in some flexibility for the detours the Lord might have in mind for you?

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So, what are my specific challenges and how have I met them?

My husband has sleep disorders and he can not drive long distances alone. He boss schedules out of town unit meetings once a month, but we never know from one month to the next what day the meeting will be on. So I just automatically schedule one day a month off school for the kids. I choose a random day. Then when I find out what day it really will be, I just sit down at the computer and reschedule the school work to reflect the day when we know what it is. To help me with this I use Switched on School House curriculum with my daughter, which allows rescheduling and for my son, since we don't use a boxed curriculum, but I use Homeschool Tracker to keep track of his schedule, I can easily reschedule his work as well.

My other challenge is that I have physical issues and often need to schedule physical therapy for myself and be gone for an hour or more sometimes. When the kids were younger, I packed up the lap top computer and the school books and took them with me. My PT let me set them up in a back room where they could work. Now that they are older, I have trained them to work from a list. I have a list of school tasks that they follow and they just work through it all each morning pretty much independent of me. I can go to therapy and they work on stuff I don't need to help with, saving the other for either before or after my therapy.

What are your special challenges that require flexibility?

Have you shared on your blog how you meet difficulties in your school year?

How have you handled curriculum difficulties where you find what you have planned simply isn't working well?

How have you handled difficulties such as health issues that threaten your homeschool progress?

If you have some practical ideas for scheduling difficulties and flexibility in your homeschool, add a link to your post about it on your blog and don't forget to link it back here as well.