Homeschool Planning in a Hurry

1. I prayed. I told God I knew He could lead me to plan my homeschool year quickly or smooth the way to change our start date. I poured myself into trusting Him to guide my decisions, and I asked our Sorrowful Mother to comfort my heart to be able to hear His will.
2. I did my Ponder Workbook (click for free download!) in one sitting. I forced myself to put an answer for every question and put the first thing that came to mind rather than spending days reflecting as I usually do. Taking more time for these questions is ideal, but this was still an essential first step to help me make the right choices for our year.
3. I met with my two students individually, which took a little less than an hour total, to ask them what they liked and didn’t like about last year and how they think they’d like to do school this year. I discussed their interests and assessed how to get their "buy in" for academics and activities. (And since you'll ask, yes, I'm creating a new free download as a guide to this type of conversation!)
4. I limited my time to research curriculum. I spent about an hour looking at print catalogs for inspiration. I spent about an hour pulling books from my own curriculum shelves. And then I spent two days, about three hours each, online gathering ideas and writing all of the possibilities for each student down, starting with my Mega Curriculum List. There is too much out there to look at it all, so I knew I had to limit myself to quick skims and jotted down anything which interested me.
5. I listed out the subjects I wanted each student to cover and filled in the easy decisions from my notes. I added the books I knew I needed to shopping carts (making sure I was logged in to save the cart). This took about an hour.
6. I then looked at the empty spaces and spent more time digging into sample pages (IME Christian Book is the best place for sample pages of non-Catholic resources) and thinking through what would be the best fit. For a few subjects I went back to my students and presented 2-3 options to them and asked for their input, making clear I would still make the final decision. This took me another two days, spending about two hours a day researching, and I contemplated these choices as I went about my other daily duties. Finally, I sat down and forced myself to fill in the blanks.
7. Once I had all of my decisions made, I ordered everything I needed. While waiting for new materials to arrive, I entered lesson plans in my online planner for the first two weeks for the materials I already owned, scheduling each subject to be done daily. My youngest student usually doesn’t do every subject every day, but I plan to alter that when I incorporate all the new materials.

Then, I stared at the growing pile of unopened packages of materials for about a week after school began until I finally opened them yesterday! I intend to spend a few hours this weekend incorporating the new stuff into our plans, entering a couple of weeks of lessons into my planner, and tweaking things from the first two weeks.

And that's it! Another two weeks after incorporating the new stuff, I'll probably make some tweaks again. I've found that trying something for two weeks is the key to gathering enough intel to decide if it's working or not working and how to modify it.

Full disclosure: with this model of planning, I'll have to continue adding lessons to my online homeschool planner for several more weeks, because I didn't do it all at once, like I usually do in the summer.

If you have more than ten days to plan, I created a series of mini-courses, called bootcamps, to walk you through my planning process after the Ponder Workbook. I recommend completing the Discerning Curriculum Bootcamp, then the Planning Your Days Bootcamp, and finally (do not skip) the Holy Habits Bootcamp to ensure you can consistently implement the plan you made! And May-August, I usually run a special on these courses.

Whether you spend 10 days or 10 weeks planning, the keys are to begin with prayer and to be open to tweaking the plan as you go. Have a great school year!