How to Create a Schedule for Homeschooling with Littles

For the day 4 of the hop I thought I’d talk a bit about scheduling with multiple littles.  I know that scheduling can be tricky even with just one child.  How do you do your scheduling?  I schedule it all out but understand that my plans aren’t set in stone and chances are they will not always be followed.

When I start scheduling out my school year I first choose what curriculum I want to use.  Next I start with the highest grade and work my way down.  I plan out down to what pages they will do each day.  I’m a bit anal with that.  It’s rather weird how detailed I get in my planning except for the part that I know these plans won’t be kept!  It doesn’t matter to me if I keep them all or not, but I must plan them.

I know some people who can’t handle winging it.  I know some people who couldn’t plan a day or even a week to save their lives.  But for me I do both.  I schedule out my year so I know where I need to be when or where I have extra days to make up for missed ones.  Then I wing it.  If we have something going on then I know I can skip a day and make it up.  Or if my kiddos decide that they want to do double work one day it’s okay because I can work with that.

The one thing that we never change is the order of our day.  I have found that we must keep the same order or it throws my kiddos off.  They are creatures of habit and if we are going to do school we need to keep our daily schedule.  We may not need to keep our yearly schedule on a daily basis but our daily schedule needs to stay the same.  Throwing off our schedule throws off the whole day I’ve found and I hate throwing off a day.

I had to think what I could include as my 5 things for this blog post.  So I’m going to end with 5 things we make sure to have in our schedule daily!

1) get dressed!  Just because we school at home doesn’t mean we have to run around in our jammies all day!

2)  Do our chores.  Each of my kids has chores that they must complete.  They have to do these everyday even on school days and Sundays.

3)  Read the Bible(or listen to me read it aloud to them).  This is very important and is how we start off our school day.

4)  Help each other.  In our house we have to be nice and help each other.  I often have big kids help do up buttons or tie shoes on their younger siblings.  They don’t take over the entire care but they do help out with things.  Even my youngest can help the oldest do something.  We’re still working on being nice to each other. . . .

5)  Have fun!  The most important thing of anyday whether it be a school day or not is that we have fun and learn something.