How do you create a homeschool plan for the year that really works?

Whether you are a new homeschooler or an experienced pro, at this time of year, many families are thinking about their next homeschool year and how to approach homeschool planning. So, how to plan a homeschool year for success? If you take a child-led approach to home education, you may be wondering - should I even put together a plan? In my view, the answer is YES. I’m a homeschool mom of two children with a lot of neurodiversity between us. I work while homeschooling my kids - NorthStar is my company, and we make hands-on inclusive secular homeschool unit studies. I also tend our half-acre mini-urban farm with ducks and chickens. It’s a lot to juggle - but my family is thriving. I believe you too can create a simple homeschool plan that builds in flexibility and helps you stay organized and work together as a homeschool parent-child team. 

But there is an important first step that is the secret to a successful homeschool plan, especially when you practice interest-led learning. So, what is the key to planning a homeschool year for success?

Craft Your Homeschool Vision Together 

The first and most important idea for a successful interest-led homeschool plan for the year is to work WITH your child to create a vision. In my last post, I talked about how to help children identify and pursue interests. Crafting a vision helps keep you and your child on a path of their choosing, providing direction and purpose. In my former career, I worked in strategic planning with large cities and small communities. I’ve seen firsthand the importance of a vision - with a vision, you can literally “see” if you are on the right track - it provides clarity, motivation, and focus. With homeschooling, I can almost guarantee that your vision will shift and change a lot as your kids learn and grow. So, I’d suggest you reassess your homeschool vision as part of your yearly homeschool planning process. As homeschoolers, I believe it’s critical that our kids are part of creating a vision for their education. I’ve heard many stories of homeschool parents who go crazy over the idea of laminated routines and a fancy homeschool room, but their kids would rather homeschool in the woods after they’ve run circles for 4 hours (and vice versa!)  In this post, I will go into detail about how to make a simple vision with your child, set clear goals, and create a “bucket list” with all your collective wishes for the year. I will follow up this post with another about how you can use this vision to create a flexible structure for your homeschool year.

First, an important note about…

Expectations in Homeschooling

You, the parent, very likely have lots of goals and expectations for your child. You may also need to meet certain state requirements. Part of the challenge of interest-led learning is figuring out how to break down and minimize the “Musts” from everyone else and replace them with the things that fulfill and motivate your child. In doing so, you raise kids who know what they want in life and how to pursue it.

STEP 1: Discuss Your Child’s Big Dreams

Schedule a time when you can talk with each child without distractions. Make this as comfortable and fun as possible. Your goal here is for your child to feel connected and open with you. A snack, one-on-one attention for the child, and a cozy spot to sit, like a hammock seat or comfy armchair, can all help create a good environment for connection. Discuss your child’s dreams for life, fun ideas, and how these might translate into goals and a plan for the year. Hold back from discussing practicality and adult expectations at first. Your goal is to engage your child's imagination and to tease out your child’s thoughts, not to pressure them. Ask big questions about long-term dreams - you could even get creative and make a vision board with your child, which might help them come up with more ideas. A simple vision board can be just some words written on a big piece of cardboard with lots of drawings or photos cut out of magazines. You could also make a vision statement about how you both want your homeschool days to look. For planning your year, though, I think it's helpful to start with dreams instead of methods.

What if your child doesn’t have any long-term dreams? Or just can’t think of any? Skip to step 3 and start with a “wish list” instead, then work backward to identify larger goals and dreams from these.

STEP 2: Set Yearly Goals

Once you have identified a few dreams, talk about how this could translate into goals for the year. Sometimes this will be simple - a child who loves martial arts might want to test for a new belt. Sometimes this will be more complicated - my son dreams of discovering a new animal species someday. So, we’ve talked about what biologists do and what kinds of things he might need to know - those things are used to make goals for the year. The best goals are S.M.A.R.T. - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Based. So, have your child figure out what success for their goal looks like and set a time when it will be complete.

This is the moment when you, as the parent, can choose to bring in a few “musts.” Remember, if your goal is a self-motivated child, approach this with caution. Think long and hard about WHY you think something is a must and WHETHER or not it is something your child can learn WHEN/IF they need it. If you must meet the state's requirements, you may choose to mention that. Or, keep that to yourself, and work backward, matching what you are planning with your child to the state requirements.

I might get some heat about this from those who take a more radical unschooling approach, but I do believe we can have expectations for our children and still empower our kids to direct the course of their education. I think the important part is that this is a COLLABORATIVE process. Both parties (parent and child) express their needs and work together to problem-solve how to meet their goals together.

Here’s how this looks in my homeschool - my son hates handwriting, and it’s super hard for him. But he LOVES telling stories. As a parent, I can see that generally in life, it’s helpful to be able to put words down on paper, one way or another and that learning to do so would help him advance with something that he loves - story-telling. So, together, we created goals for his writing. His main goal was to write and illustrate his own comic book. From there, we broke down the project into smaller goals, responsibilities, and tasks. 

I offered to be his scribe during the brainstorming process, but we agreed that he would illustrate, write, or type the final copy. I offered that learning to type and getting better at handwriting would help him to create more comic books, even if I wasn’t available to be his scribe. He agreed that learning to type was an important goal. He also agreed that practicing his handwriting would help so that he can capture ideas on his own. This gave us an AWESOME opportunity for problem-solving. We talked about WHY he feels handwriting is hard for him. What could make it more comfortable? What would be a manageable number of lines to start with, and what would he like his goal for the year to be? Does having to do spelling make it harder to write by hand? He had strong opinions about what worked for him and what didn’t. I was surprised to learn that dictation was by far his preferred method for practicing handwriting. We might have struggled with hating handwriting and avoiding it if I hadn't asked. He made great strides last year, and I credit this approach.

STEP 3: Create a bucket list for the year

What excites your child about the coming year? What fun things do they want to see, do, or explore? A “bucket list” makes it much easier to plan special things that will bring joy to your school year and help kids stay engaged with their learning. Your child can pick items on this list to celebrate or reward themselves for hard work, or these ideas can help with brainstorming future dreams and goals. Last year, our bucket list involved a road trip to John Day Fossil, followed by a visit to a spot where we got to dig for real fossils. We also had a “fair” day where my child built his own pretend rides and arcade games. It was such great hands-on learning! Be sure to share any fun ideas you, the grown-up, have to see if these ideas excite your kids. There’s not much point in planning something fun just for the kids if they think it sounds boring!

After clarifying your child’s dreams, goals, and wishes, you should have an excellent starting point for planning a successful homeschool year. Stay tuned for my next post, where I will go into the second part of a successful homeschool plan - how to stay organized and develop a flexible structure for your homeschool year. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date!

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