Homeschool Prep Schedule

Simplistic Homeschool Planning

Preparing to homeschool can be overwhelming — especially when you don’t know what to expect that first year. 

With that said, I’ve learned a lot while homeschooling my own kiddos and this homeschool prep schedule just works, you guys!

While I used to plan our homeschool year over the summer months, we now full-time RV and tend to do a bulk of our school work over the summer, leaving planning time for fall.

Whether you homeschool year-round, utilize a traditional school year, or homeschool unconventionally as we do, you can prep your homeschool with the exact same methods.

Prepping an Entire Homeschool Year

Can you plan an entire homeschool year in as little as 10 days?

The short answer? Yes!

With that said, I follow a pretty consistent homeschool schedule and basically have the homeschool planning process down to a science.

While planning our homeschool year over a 10-day period used to be my reality, I can easily knock out this task in a single afternoon these days.

However, I do still sometimes spread it out and complete it in 2-3 days when I feel like it.

Learning how to prep your homeschool using a 10-day homeschool prep schedule will make weekly lesson planning throughout the homeschool year feel like an absolute breeze!

How to Homeschool Prep Like a Pro

Believe it or not, homeschooling like a pro isn’t only for the pros.

Anyone can homeschool like a pro if they put forth a little extra planning effort in the beginning while allowing room for flexibility throughout the year.

If you’re ready to start your new homeschool year prepped and ready to go, try following these simple homeschool prep steps!

Break It up by Subject or Student

Yes, yes, yes.

While I choose to break up all of our homeschool prep by subject instead of student, you can easily adapt this schedule by utilizing days 3-6 for students instead of subjects.

When I was using this method with 3 children (I now only have to do it with 1) focusing on 1-2 subjects per day was easiest for me.

I like to plan for all 3 of my kiddos to finish school in the same week if possible and this simply helped me gauge if one kiddo had more lessons in a specific subject than my other 2 kiddos.

Sometimes it helped me determine if we needed to start earlier or double up on certain subjects right from the get-go.

Plus, by doing this I could easily look at my weekly load as a homeschool mom.

For example, if kid 1 has a hefty project that they will need assistance on and it falls on the same week I’m teaching kid 2 to write an essay, I may want to tweak the lessons a bit to give myself a lighter load each day.

I’m able to compare lesson loads, supplies needed, and extra projects making for a smoother homeschool week.

If you choose to break yours up by student instead of subject, simply make notes of time-consuming projects as you go along giving you something to reference as you get to that subject with the following child.

Breaking things up into smaller chunks by focusing on 1 student or 1-2 subjects makes it feel less overwhelming.

Set Small Goals

This is always some of my top advice for new homeschool parents!

It’s easy to set your sights high and make unreachable goals — leaving you with feelings of failure and despair.

Set small goals with everything from your homeschool prep to your homeschool year.

While I personally love to do all the things, I quickly learned that homeschooling is just easier if I stick to simple.

Easy ways to set small goals in your homeschool — from prep to execution.

• Focus on core subjects — ditch the extras that first year. Focusing mainly on math, language arts, science, and history makes for more reachable goals!
• Plan in bursts — turn your 10-day prep into a 20-day prep schedule. Taking the time to look over curriculum and set realistic goals.

Take some time to set simple, yet realistic goals. Then, take a deep breath and do some planning.

Homeschool Prep 10-Day Schedule

While you can technically get all your homeschool prep completed in just a couple of days you could also spread it out over an entire month if you wanted!

This sample 10-day schedule is a realistic, happy medium.

Prior to RV life, my 10-day schedule actually looked much different than the one below.

We utilized workbooks for multiple subjects and cut the binding off everything else.

Workbook subjects required little to no prep while worksheets had to be sorted into our file folder system.

With that said, you can view my most updated 10-day plan (designed for newbies) below.

This generic example schedule is a simple glimpse at what your 10-day homeschool planning process may look like.

Check out my full breakdown below!

Homeschool Prep Schedule Breakdown

While my homeschool planning process has evolved over the years, it has never completely changed.

You can view my previous homeschool prep schedule in the blog post, Summer Homeschool Planning. This post was written well before RV life and all of my children utilized a language arts curriculum in workbook form that needed little to no prep so I simply excluded it from my homeschool prep.

With that said, the simple breakdown below will help you get a more in-depth look at the 10-day planning process I used to utilize in my own homeschool!

• Days 1 & 2

While creating your own pacing guide can be time-consuming, it is actually a pretty simple process!

Glance through your kiddo’s curriculum, do a little math involving the number of homeschool days for your upcoming year and the number of lessons per subject each student will have, then pace it all out!

Allowing 2 days for this simply gives you the chance to create a rough draft of your pacing guide, tweak it half a dozen times, then finalize it.

Check out the process I use for creating our personal homeschool pacing guides and get your hands on a free editable pacing guide to use in your own homeschool! 

• Days 3 – 6

These days of homeschool prep are set aside for preparing each individual subject.

I prep our homeschool by subject rather than by student simply because it’s what I prefer.

However, you can definitely mix this up and plan 1-2 children per day.

With that said, I figure most homeschoolers will learn 6-8 subjects at a time, and allowing yourself a 4-day period to prep them is ideal.

I currently only have one kiddo learning at home, but I used this very method when I had all 3 of my kiddos learning at home!

Since we currently full-time RV with our kids, most of our curriculum is actually digital.

We keep PDF copies of all curricula on the computer and prep our school year by creating pacing guides at the beginning of our year, then lesson planning in a 12-week rotation using our file folder system.

This just works, you guys!

• Days 7-9

These days are set aside for creating supplies needed lists for each student.

While we plan our homeschool in 12-week bursts, you can do this however works best for homeschooling.

For example, if you have a super in-depth curriculum you may want to do this task weekly or biweekly. Or if you utilize a little to no prep curricula, you may be able to get away with doing this once per semester.

Either way, I highly suggest getting ahead of the ball game and looking through the first 6 weeks of your child’s curriculum and creating a supplies needed list to get your homeschool year started off on the right foot.

Trust me on this one.

• Day 10

This is my favorite day, you guys!

From organizing all the homeschool supplies to putting all our curriculum in its place!

While I love focusing on deep cleaning and creating a place for everything, you can totally go as heavy or light on this as you choose.

With that said, having an organizational system of some sort is definitely a must.

Having an organized homeschool will help you stress less!

Homeschool Prep & Planning

If you consider yourself a homeschool newbie, take some time to browse the entire homeschool section on Life + Homeschool to help you get started on your new journey! Or, check out the Life + Homeschool Facebook group!