Flexible Homeschool Plan Wrap Up

Step 1: Determining Your School Year

For the greatest flexibility in your school year, I highly recommend a year-round homeschooling schedule.

That doesn't mean you'll "do school" every day of the year, it just means that you have the entire year available to you. For us that means we have 261 days (365-104 weekend days) to get our required 180 days completed. That's 81 days of flexibility!

Did you miss setting the dates for your year-round school year? Find the post here or by clicking on the calendar image above.

Step 2: Finding Your Routine

Using a block schedule establishes structure and routine while still allowing flexibility in your day.

Find out how to set up a block schedule here or by clicking the image below.

Step 3: Deciding What to Teach and When

Before you can schedule your resources you have to determine what those resources are and when you're going to use them! There are lots of things to consider when deciding what to teach such as learning styles, your teaching style, state requirements, and more.

If you missed it, I walk you through the process in this post.

Step 4: Scheduling Your Resources

The heart of a flexible homeschool plan! In this step, we learned how to schedule every subject you have, as far in advance as you'd like. This is a tedious and time-consuming step, BUT it will save you countless hours throughout the year AND you can use your schedule no matter what changes, interruptions, or challenges you face throughout the year.

Step 5: Putting it All to Work

Up to this point, we filled out a lot of forms and you likely asked yourself "how in the world does all of this work together?"

In this post, I show you my planner and how I put it all together to make a flexible homeschool plan that you can use throughout the entire year no matter what comes up!

• Changing curriculum?
  No problem!
• Taking some time off?
  No problem!
• Decide to skip a day of school?
  No problem!

This system will provide the structure you need while still remaining very flexible to changes, both intentional and unexpected.

Step 6: Facing the Challenges

Having a pretty planner with neatly filled in forms won't do you much good if you don't understand how it all works together to meet the challenges we all face during a school year. Things like...

...unexpected interruptions
...moving faster, or slower, than we expected with curriculum
...adding subjects, or taking them away
...adding classes or other extracurriculars to our schedule
...changing our curriculum in the middle of the year

In this post, I walk you through some challenging scenarios and show you how having a flexible homeschool plan makes it easy to face them.

Step 7: Structured Free Time

In steps 1 through 6 we looked at ways to make your written plan and curriculum more flexible, but what about when lessons are over? All to often an abundance of free time can lead to hours of electronics or repeated exclamations of "I'm bored!"

Find out what structured free time is and how it can add more flexibility to your days.

Step 8: Organizing the Stuff

Organizing may not seem all that important to having a flexible homeschool, but the reality is the more organized we are the more flexibility we have. It means that we can stress less about finding the things we need, stop wasting our time looking for stuff, and focus on the things that matter.

So how do we get organized? Find out how I stay organized in this post.

I hope that you've enjoyed the 10 Days to a Flexible Homeschool Plan series and learned a few ways to add more flexibility to your homeschool.

Be sure to visit all of the other great bloggers that are taking part in the 10 Days of Tips for Homeschool Moms series. Here are all the goodies you'll find!