Planning to Homeschool

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Proverbs 29:18a

If you are about to begin homeschooling in the fall or you’ve made the leap in the middle of a school year, you’re next step is to have a planning weekend with your spouse. While you may think that, its unnecessary to plan with your spouse since you’ll be doing most of the teaching… But you won’t. Homeschooling is a family affair, and you will need your spouse’s understanding and unconditional support for the road ahead.

A planning weekend is just the incentive needed to develop your homeschool mission, handle current behavioral issues, list personal struggles, decide your homeschool budget, review avenues of outside support (coops, magazines, plan field trips, bible studies, and other homeschool groups), organize your schedule, discuss commitments outside of homeschooling, and agree on yearly goal. DonnaYoung.org has wonderful free planning sheets that you can use as daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly goal planners. Its a great start for getting your thoughts organized and not feeling overwhelmed with things to do.
If you need a checklist for starting a school year for your weekend you can find a wonderful one at TeachingHome.com

Here is a little of what our planning discussions look like:
Marriage
How well are we relating?
Are we having our weekly dates?
Are we praying together regularly?
Is there still “fire” in our relationship?
What are we doing to nurture our relationship? Should we be doing more?
What relationships would we like to pursue as a couple? Are there marriages we admire or respect? Would spending time with those couples be helpful to us? What could we learn from them?
Has either of us read anything we think would be helpful and would like to share?
What are we doing or going to do to keep our marriage
strong?
Is there something we would enjoy doing or learning to do together as a couple?

Family
What is He calling us to as a family?
How does that look?
How should it look?
Are we fulfilling that call?
Are we spending enough quality time as a family?
Are there areas we need to change – to refocus?

Children
What is our vision for our children?
What are their strengths and weaknesses?
Where are they doing well?
What areas need improvement?

Home Education
What’s working, what isn’t?
Do we need to make curriculum changes or just approach from a different direction?
Are they ready for this yet or should we wait awhile?
Do they have a real interest in something that we should let them pursue now and drop something they aren’t so interested in until later?

Finances
Are there areas where we want to increase/decrease our giving?
Are we staying within our budget? Do we need to
rework it?
What items do we need to budget for in the coming
year?

I hope this motivates you to get planning!