Raise your hand if your homeschool days always go as planned.
{My hand is not raised. And crickets are chirping.}
If it’s not already absolutely apparent, I want you to know that I love to plan. I’ve written plans and checklists down on post-it notes since… before I was born? (Okay, okay, okay. I’m exaggerating. But I think I have written plans and checklists from about the time I could hold a pencil.)
But the reality of our lives is not what is written down in my plans. My plans are just plans, and my plans get derailed from time to time (and sometimes more often than that). Over time, I’ve equipped myself to handle the harsh reality of life by planning to be flexible.
What does that mean, anyway?
How I plan to be flexible
I only schedule out our reading selections for 24 weeks of the school year because I like to have a reading goal. It is the one goal I really like to have structured in our home. But we are flexible in that we provide ourselves 12 extra weeks for “catching up” when life interrupts… or when we’ve gone on one too many rabbit trails, which we are apt to do from time to time (and sometimes more often than that).
For subjects like math or spelling/phonics, I use a 12-week planner page to get an overall goal for each “third” of the school year, and I usually leave a day or two open every other week in case we end up with illness, or a spontaneous field trip, or…? I don’t write my daily plans into my weekly planner pages until we have finished the week. (If you only knew how I used to practically choke myself to death with eraser dust!) Yet still, believe it or not, we finish our overall goals for the year and move on to the next grade at the close of the school year. Please listen to me, my friends: It’s okay to plan flexibility into your schedule.
About the book Plan to Be Flexible
This brings me to a book I read earlier this summer, Plan to be Flexible: Designing a Homeschool Rhythm and Curriculum Plan that Works for your Family by Alicia Kazsuk, which provides new homeschoolers – and veteran homeschoolers – ideas for organizing your school days while balancing those ideas with the flexibility that homeschooling offers.
Plan to be Flexible provides help with:
- analyzing what’s working (or not) in your homeschool
- developing a flexible, goal-oriented curriculum plan for each student
- discovering how to find a rhythm for your homeschool within a framework of those goal-oriented curriculum plans
- learning how to homeschool with joy and freedom
Although I have homeschooled for several years now, I found this book to be full of practical advice gleaned from real-life experiences. This advice is broken down into three parts:
“Establish and Refine Goals” provides ideas for using the finish line as a daily guide for adjusting your homeschool year. It gives guidelines for determining what’s working (and what’s not) and how to use that to establish your family’s goals for the coming year.
“Develop a Curriculum Plan” gives instructions for creating a master school year calendar, building a custom-built curriculum core for each student, and using living curriculum for real, live kids. The idea is to build an organized yet flexible subject plan. [This is what I love of about planning structure for 24 weeks of our school year. We have another 12 weeks to finish any extras (or not). Our homeschool curriculum provides structure but flexibility at the elementary-grade stage, which is a huge blessing!]
“Find Your Family’s Rhythm” discusses the difference between rhythms and schedules and how to consider your family’s unique circumstances in homeschooling with joy and freedom.
The appendix includes assessment questions and resources. What’s more, each chapter concludes with an action plan. It really is a study guide for learning to plan and organize your school days!
A few thoughts
Don’t overeat at the buffet! I’ve used this exact analogy in explaining our resources lists, booklists, and reading plans. (In fact, the following quote could have been my exact words! Seriously!)
“You don’t have to do everything on your list. Like the items at an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet, you don’t need to fill your days with absolutely every item from your Subject Plan. Really.” (p. 73)
Impromptu learning is valuable and wonderful and necessary to foster a curiosity and inquisitiveness about God and His creation. Allow your plans to derail a bit if there’s a specific interest that needs to be researched!
What about unfinished projects? It’s okay to not finish a project. Sometimes, you find that what you were planning to do was not the best activity for your family to explore a particular concept. Sometimes, you end up with unexpected circumstances that force you to set projects on the backburner.
“Do we look at half-created projects and consider the assignment a failure?” (p. 132)
Maybe we should look at the half-created project and see it as half-completed instead of half-undone.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. Flexibility in homeschooling is a requirement because life happens. Every year we go through interruptions. For us, it was homeschooling through chainsaw chaos in Fall 2011. One year later, it was an eye surgery. The next year? It was homeschooling through the first trimester of pregnancy. And throughout these homeschooling years, we’ve faced deaths in the family and other unforeseen circumstances. And we work through it. We persevere. Our family does not homeschool only when it’s easy. Our children get to see what living life is really like because they are a constant part of that life. And life is not perfect.
The truth is, our days are not hunky-dory, by-the-plan, and picture-perfect around here. But they wouldn’t be hunky-dory, by-the-plan, and picture-perfect even if we didn’t homeschool. I’d rather have my children with me through it all.
Wouldn’t you?
We received a copy of the book Plan to Be Flexible in exchange for a review. All opinions expressed in this review are my own personal opinions.