How I Planned 36 Weeks of Homeschool Without Overplanning | Homeschool Planning

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Video summary

In this video, Jessica shares her approach to planning thirty-six weeks of homeschooling without falling into the trap of overplanning, marking the beginning of a five-part series on organization. She explains that while she typically flies by the seat of her pants, her daughter Emily is now in high school, requiring more structure in subjects like biology, world history, and geography. However, Jessica emphasizes that this new system is not a rigid, tried-and-true method but rather an experiment designed to provide necessary flexibility. Her primary motivation for creating this plan stems from personal changes, including perimenopause and memory lapses, which make it difficult for her to keep track of every detail in her head as she used to when Emily was younger. She realized that relying solely on her own memory led to forgotten resources, such as owl pellets for dissections, ending up lost in drawers years later. To address these challenges, Jessica developed a system that combines a thirty-six-week topic list with pre-selected extra resources like puzzles and games, weaving them into the curriculum where they make the most sense. She decided to move away from being the sole "conductor" of the homeschool day by organizing materials into a file folder system with one hanging folder for each week, color-coded by subject. This setup allows her husband Kevin and daughter Emily to access the plan independently, ensuring that learning can continue even if Jessica is sick or unavailable. While she still creates weekly schedules based on their family routine and extracurricular commitments, the overarching thirty-six-week framework ensures that all planned topics are covered without placing the entire burden of execution on her memory. The system also extends to specific textbooks, such as splitting a grammar book into weekly lessons and rebinding math chapters so they are manageable for Emily throughout the year. By pre-calculating how many lessons should be completed each week to stay on pace, Jessica hopes to give Emily visual feedback on her progress without nagging her. This transparency allows Emily to see if she is falling behind and adjust her effort accordingly, fostering a sense of autonomy rather than dependency on parental pressure. Ultimately, the goal is to create a robust yet adaptable framework that covers all intended learning objectives while reducing stress and preventing the frustration of lost materials or forgotten activities.

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[music] >> Hey everybody, welcome to The Waldock Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be all about how I planned out 36 weeks of homeschool without overplanning. Now, before I get into the nitty-gritty on this video, because I know you guys are all about some organizing and planning, which by the way, this is the first in a five-part series. So, if organizing and planning is your jam, make sure you're subscribed and that you have that notification bell turned on cuz you're not going to want to miss it. But, I do want to preface this video by saying this is not a tried-and-true system for us. This is the first year that we're attempting it because I needed something different. So, this could be a total success or an epic failure. So, please know that going in. I will update you in the future as to how this ended up working for us, but I do want to share why I decided to do it, how I'm doing it, and how I'm hoping to implement it, and like why I think it's going to work. But, in that same breath, I want you to know this isn't tried-and-true. I don't know for sure that this is going to work. So, we're going to figure this out together. My main goals with knowing that I needed a plan more than I usually would do is because Emily's in high school, there were certain things that I knew we needed to be getting done or touching on this school year a little more than kind of like flying by the seat of our pants that we normally do. So, I was like, okay, we're going to need some structure. But, I also still want flexibility cuz I don't want to be like, on February 12th, this is the lesson you need to do cuz psh, we all know that's not going to work. I also needed to not be the orchestrator and the brain of everything. Like, in the past, when Emily was younger and when I was the one doing everything, it was a lot easier for me to just like keep everything in my brain. I was the one who knew all the curriculum. I was keeping track of everything. I was planning everything. I was doing everything, and that was fine with me. However, as Emily's gotten older, as Kevin's taken on some of the high school workload this year, as we've been outsourcing some things, um as perimenopause has hit, and I just don't have the memory that I once had, unfortunately, that is just no longer it doesn't work. Because I can say, "Oh, when we learn about um animal characteristics, I want to do owl pellet dissections now." And that sounds great, and maybe I even bought them with that in mind, but by the time we get to the lesson, I've forgot. Um not only did I forget what I want to do, I probably forgot where I put the owl pellets, and then before I know it, 3 years from now I'm finding owl pellets in a drawer somewhere. So, what I knew I needed was structure, but flexible structure, and structure that was going to be like, "This is what you said you wanted to do in the beginning when your brain was in planning mode and on fire, and you were firing on all synapses, and you knew what you wanted." And that's easy, because I kind of already picked our curriculum, and I had kind of already decided to buy a lot of like the extras that I wanted to use, some of the extra resources, the games, all of that. If you missed it, I will link those videos up here, but I already had all of the stuff, right? It was all already in. Um I had filmed a video, so it was all already out. So, while it was all out and kind of ready for me to go and there in front of me, I decided to take what I was hoping that we were going to hit and learn about in Emily's ninth grade year, specifically for biology, world history, and world geography. And I wrote it down. I broke it down into 36 weeks, or 36 topics, if you will. So, for example, I knew like um in week four, we were going to be learning about animal cells in biology. So, because of that, while I was like, "Okay, this is what we're going to do in week four, because that's the fourth topic I want us to address," I also know that I have this animal cell 4D puzzle, and I have the game Cytosis. This would all work really well that week. So, I started kind of doing that. I made a plan for 36 topics and 36 weeks, if you will, for those different things for biology, for world history, world geography. I sat down and I said, "These are the 36 things I want us to learn. This is the order I want us to go in, more than likely. Here is the extras that I have, whether that was a puzzle, or a game, or a lab, or a hands-on project, or a field trip I wanted to take." And I kind of wove those in where they made the most sense. Now, does that mean that's the only time we're going to play that game? Probably not. Does it mean that we're going to for sure play it that week? Also, maybe not. But, I knew that when I was purchasing them, that's kind of what I had in mind. So, instead of forgetting, I made sure I had a plan with those things in mind. After I did that, I thought, "You know what would be even better is if I wasn't the only one who knew this." Right? If I wasn't the only one who knew that on week four, we were going to do animal cells, play this game, and do this puzzle. Because the lab part, Kevin's going to be handling, which means that the cell puzzle he would be doing with her. So, it would be fantastic if I wasn't the one who was like orchestrating it all, or I wasn't being the conductor of it. Especially because Emily's in high school, like she can be independent with a lot of this stuff. So, then I decided that it would be really cool if I could put everything in one place where everybody had access to it, and it wasn't dependent on me. And that's when I kind of decided to go with the file folder system route, because I knew that I could put everything in a file folder, and just say, "Hey, go pull week four, and get all that done." Right? Like, I mean, granted, that wasn't my plan, and that's not what I'm going to do on a weekly basis, but I knew I could. So, I decided to get 36 hanging files, one for each week, and then I put a different color file folder in for each of the main um subjects that I had planned. So, for example, blue is world geography, red is world history, and green is biology. Emily picked the colors cuz she said they made the best sense to her in her mind, so I just went with it. And then what I did is I put everything for that week in that folder. So, for example, there are like week six is plant cells. So, the plant cell papers and all of the different like loose things that I was hoping we would touch on are in there. There's also a Post-it note in there because there's things that won't fit. So, there's a Post-it note put in there that reminds me that I wanted to do the plant cell 4D puzzle, as well as hopefully play the game Cellulose, because those are really great things that would complement that lesson. So, now all of that is in one place. It's also out of my mind, and I no longer have to be the person like conducting it and orchestrating all of it. Because if I'm sick, if I have a migraine, if I don't feel well, if I'm out of town, if for whatever reason I am indisposed, there is no reason why Kevin or Emily cannot pull week six and know that everything in this file folder and this hanging folder needs to get done this week. Now, ideally, I still make a homeschool plan every week, and I say, "This is the things we're going to do on Monday. This is the things we're going to do on Tuesday. This is the things we're going to do on Wednesday. Kevin, here's what you need to do with Emily." Because it just makes the most sense if I already kind of organize it because I know our schedule, I know what days we have more time, I know when we can get the things done. I know what she's doing for extracurricular. However, that doesn't mean that it all has to fall on me. If there's a week that, like I said, I'm just not up for it, our homeschool no longer has to stop because I'm not the one doing it. Like, they can still handle it by themselves. And as far as showing you guys how I actually plan like on a weekly basis, that is coming next week. I'm going to go through all of how I plan, what I do, kind of how I pull it all out, and you'll see a lot more in my planner and all of that, because I want you guys to like see this system in action, if you will. So, that is coming in next week's video. But, I'm just really, really excited about how this worked out because after I started doing that and I planned out those things for 36 weeks, I thought, "Oh, you know what else? I can put everything in here." Now, I didn't pull apart our Fix It Grammar book, but that one's easy because it's already split up by week. So, I'm like, "Okay, we're on week three. I know we do week three in Fix It Grammar." Like, that's super easy. But, our Editor in Chief, I went ahead and split that book up and so I have um the answer key bound, but I took all of the pages out that Emily does and I split them into 36 weeks. I think there's like 66 lessons in that. So, there's two a week for 32 weeks. Um or 33 weeks. So, I just put two in each of the weeks. So, I just know, "Okay, we're going to do two of those a week." Then, I also always unbind her uh Denison math because it's a very, very big student notebook and it's a little overwhelming for her. And also, I find that it starts falling apart towards the end of the year anyway because it's so big and it's just so much. So, I unbind it and I rebind one chapter and give that to her at a time, but I don't rebind all of them because we have ProClicks that we can reopen. So, I just keep one like Denison, for example, chapter one. When she's done, I open it up, take those out, put in chapter two. So, I also went ahead and pre-counted, "Okay, if we do four math lessons a week, we should hit chapter three about, I don't know, we'll just say week seven." So, I put chapter three in the hanging file folder of week seven. And then same thing for like, "Okay, we'll hit chapter four about week nine." And so, I did that all the way through the 36 weeks. I'm hoping that this will do a couple of things. Number one, kind of keep us on pace because math is the one thing that she tends to be like, "I don't want to do it today." And I'm like, "Okay, you don't have to." And then at the end, she feels like, "Oh, I should have not taken so many days off." Um again, I give her autonomy over that, so I'm not going to be nagging her about it. But, I think it would be helpful for her to see, "Okay, if I wanted to in fact be finished by, you know, the end of 36 weeks, this is where I should have been on week seven. So, maybe now I need to do five lessons a week to get kind of caught back up there. I think it's going to be better for her to have that visual than at the end of the year go, oh gosh, I still have four chapters left to do. Because I didn't do as much as I should have been doing along the school year. Um but mom had the papers in the office and I wouldn't have known otherwise. Now she'll know because it will be in the hanging file folder if she had kept the pace that I had kind of anticipated that she would keep. So, I'm hoping that will be one thing. It'll keep us on pace. It will keep me from being the person who has to do everything. Like if I have a bad week, home school can still move on. It will also make sure that we are covering all of the things that I want to cover in some form or fashion. Now, just because I say week 10 is enzymes, that doesn't mean that we're going to do every paper in that folder. I just put everything that I had in there for that week. It also might mean that we read from a book and cover the same topic and I'm okay with that. It was just a way for me to dump everything into one place instead of having all these pieces and parts all over the place. Or for the things that don't fit, making a note of where they're at. So, for example, game shelf or you know, in the office or wherever I'm storing them so that when it comes time to do that lesson, I can easily grab what I need and have it on hand and hopefully save us a lot of time and frustration.