Home Schooling Program

Scheduling & Planning Home Schooling Program

The biggest burden that a homeschooling parent may face could be how to make a schedule for the home schooling program .
 
What your Goals Must be:

You should first make a list of goals that you've set for your child's home schooling program for the upcoming year. You should fill out a curriculum planner using your goals list. Don't go to curriculum fairs until you've done this and have gotten the hang of doing it. When you're at the curriculum fair you'll need to have your goals list and your curriculum planner handy so that when you're at the fair you don't purchase anything that you don't need.
 
The Course of Study for the home schooling program

In order to develop the course of study, you'll need to have your goal sheets ready and the books that you'll be using near at hand. All you have to do is get a sheet of paper and make an overall plan for the home schooling program that lists the subjects, the books, the supplies, and about how many times a week that you think that particular subject will be studied or how many times a week a book will be used.

You can even attempt to estimate how much time you think each subject will need. Once you've done this, you'll have an overall look at what you have and if anything is missing.

Math

Math shouldn't be planned too far in advance. Luckily, there shouldn't be a problem with scheduling math, because almost all math curriculums are pretty much laid out for you in your math kits which you can purchase as part of the home schooling resources.
 

Grammar

You will want to plan grammar the way you would plan math for your home schooling program; meaning a little at a time, perhaps a week or two in advance. Some grammar programs are easy to plan for, whereas others aren't. Daily Grams, for example has 180 lessons in it.

Spelling

Spelling books are generally laid out for you and all your child will need to do is a lesson per day for four days and then he/she will take a test on the 5th day. If you use Natural Speller or Spelling Power, you'll need to make lesson plans for the spelling as part of your home schooling program

Vocabulary

Studying words is excellent use of your child's time. There're many wonderful curriculums for home schooling programs that will make doing vocabulary easy for you. Plan for your child to study vocabulary at least 2 or 3 days per week.

Dictation

Dictation is a great tool that homeschooling parents use for learning language. It combines handwriting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, proof-reading, listening, and anything else that has to do with the language arts. You should use high quality literature for your dictation so that your child will be exposed to good examples of writing as well as building a higher vocabulary in use as part of your home schooling program.

Reading

Reading out loud should be a daily activity as well as reading silently. In the early school years, reading includes phonics instruction and learning the alphabet. In later years your child will read as a means of getting information from textbooks as well as reading for pleasure. So good reading materials should be included in your home schooling program.

Writing

If you're using a writing curriculum such as Writing Strands, Easy Writing, Wordsmith, etc., you'll need to make a decision about how many times a week you're going to have a writing class and make your choices from there. Stay away from over scheduling for writing because some children may need extra days for their lessons. You should factor this in your home school program.

Handwriting

When your child is learning the alphabet it would be a good idea to also impress how essential it is for him/her to form the letters as well. This should probably be about a 5 minute class so not to pressure the child. There are a lot of great handwriting programs that you can get from libraries, bookstores, and online. You'll need to decide which one to use and then stick with it.

Make sure that you go easy with the criticism of your child's handwriting. There's a lot of time for your child to practice and become better at writing. I would suggest short classes. Fifteen minutes should be the most amount of time spent daily on handwriting in your home schooling program.