The Homeschool Daily Schedule

Planning Your Home School Day

Having some sort of homeschool daily schedule can help you with planning your days and, as you'll see from ours, it's certainly nice when you wake up on Monday morning to have an idea of where your home school is heading.

But you don't need to follow a home school daily schedule or a planner. Every family does what suits them best; many start homeschooling with a more rigid timetable which becomes more relaxed over time.

Our Homeschool Daily Schedule

You'll know from our homeschool scheduling, that, especially when the children were younger, our daily planning was pretty relaxed.

Now they're older, it hasn't changed that much! But things do move on, particularly if you are planning to head in the direction of exams.

You'll decide for yourself how structured you want to be in your homeschool daily schedule. You can shift things around depending on age, priorities and - crucially - what works for all of you.

Our home school daily schedule is basically a weekly list which we all add to and pick things from.

Our list is our homeschool daily schedule. When you come to make yours, it can be as basic as that or with each day parcelled out into separate times.

I've put some suggestions to help you make your own home school schedule here.

Homeschool Planning

I thought it might be fun for you to be a fly on the wall and see how our homeschool schedule translates into reality.

Now William and Catherine are older we have moved into a different stage of our homeschool planning. There are some things that happen every week, like fixed planets in our home school constellation.

We go to our home school group. They have their own groups they go to - swimming, sailing, young Naturalists - whatever. Friends visit. There may be a home school Museum session, or we may be going to see inside a coal mine or something similar!

Then we have a weekly list, which we all add to. The children suggest what they want to add to the schedule - needle felting, models, lego, some project we're working on.

Presently Catherine's tied up in dragons, as you can see in our homeschool activities page.

Next, we have a few things I think have to be included in our homeschool planning. Math is a fixed item in our home school schedule as you can see from our homeschool math pages - though, if you read Gareth Lewis' Unqualified Education, you'll see that's probably more of a sign of weakness on my part. A failed basic Math exam at age 16 has left me unconfident in my ability to cover numbers in more creative ways.

Writing is also there in our daily schedule. I try to find ways of slipping it in unobtrusively - letters to friends is a good one!

William is at the stage where he enjoys workbooks. He also likes a schedule. Ours, as you can see, is pretty relaxed but you need to choose what suits you best. If you want to see different ways to do things and tips on making a homeschool planner, look here.

Back in the Chappell home school our planning includes William doing Physics and Math with Rob on Fridays. I schedule in a couple of Biology sessions twice a week.

That's about enough of a home school schedule to take us through. The kids will say roughly which day of the week they want to do something. French always happens in our house on a Wednesday morning because I think it's hard to get a language unless there's some regular continuity.

But I know that it's no good trying to do something if the children don't feel like it. If they're really not in the mood I don't push it; similarly if something's not going well we finish early.

Sometimes it's me who doesn't feel like it!

I should point out that William and Catherine are presently aged 10 and 12. I wrote this a few months ago and I can already see some changes; age and interests move on constantly and you'll need to adjust your homeschool daily schedule accordingly.

The homeschool daily schedule that suits you will be different from ours; so long as it works for you that's exactly how it should be!

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