Earlier this week, I shared about why we do year-round homeschooling. When we first began using this approach, I wasn’t sure how to go about creating a schedule. How many weeks should we be in school throughout the year? How frequently should we take breaks? For our first year, I used trial and error to figure out what works for us!
Today, I feel better equipped to plan out our year-round schedule. It is subject to change, of course, but here is how I plan it out and what it looks like.
A few notes on our year-round schedule
Before I begin, here are a couple of notes on my planning process:
- We live in Texas, so the state does not mandate how many weeks, days, or hours we must homeschool each year. If your state has laws regarding how much time you spend homeschooling, then you want to begin your planning with that information in mind.
- I don’t schedule days like Labor Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day, or even Independence Day as holidays. This is because they are often typical days for us. However, if we decide to do something on one of those days instead of school, we simply make up the work on one of the days we are scheduled to be off.
- Because we are taking frequent breaks throughout the year, I do not have a specific week designated for spring break.
Planning our year-round schedule
I begin by pulling up a calendar template in MS Excel. This particular template is titled “Any year at a glance calendar (landscape).” This is a macro-enabled calendar, so I change the dates to reflect the current year.
I begin by marking off the dates around Christmas and Thanksgiving. I do this by changing the background fill of the cells that I want to be marked off. We take the week of Thanksgiving off, as well as the two weeks before and one week after Christmas.
I discovered during our first year of year-round schooling that it works best for us to do school for several weeks and then take a short break. Therefore, our general pattern is to do school for four weeks and then take one week off. I begin mapping this out on the calendar by going to the week of Thanksgiving and working backwards. As you can see from the image below, a start date of August 16th (which is around when the local public schools start) allows us to complete three 4-week periods before Thanksgiving break.
We’ll have two weeks of school between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break. After Christmas break, I map out the rest of our school year by alternating 4-week periods of school with 1-week breaks. As you can see in the key at the bottom of the calendar, light blue dates are vacation days, underlined dates are school days, and italic dates are days off or days for catching up.
Using this approach to making a year-round homeschooling calendar provides us 38 weeks to complete our work for the year. This is more than we’ll need for some subjects. It’s nice to have the time available, though, just in case we’re unable to do school on any days that we’re currently scheduled to be completing work. If we happen to complete our work early, we’ll simply enjoy having some extra time off or we’ll move on to next year’s materials.
Other approaches to planning a year-round schedule
What I’ve done here may make sense to you. On the other hand, it may make your head spin! Thankfully, there are lots of other approaches to planning a year-round schedule. Check out some of these other approaches:
- How To Plan a Year Round Homeschool Schedule
- Our New Year-Round Homeschool Schedule
- Creating a Year Round Homeschooling Schedule
- How to Plan a Year Round Homeschooling Schedule in One Day
Whether you do year-round homeschooling or not, how do you plan your school calendar? Please share your tips and tricks with us!
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