Preparing for another school year

We're all geared up to begin our 7th year of homeschool next week! I know it's early by most public school standards, but we like to start early in order to have more flexibility to take time off throughout the school year without falling behind in our schedule. It's important to me that we completely finish our grade level by the time we take a summer break.

So I've finished my planning and organizing in preparation for school on Monday. We will again employ a 6 week on/ 1 week off schedule this year after having great success with it last year. So, the first thing I did before I even started my subject planning was print out a 2015-2016 school calendar and figure out, roughly, when we would take our breaks over the course of the next 10 months.

I've since revised this particular schedule, but here you can at least see how I highlight the weeks we plan to take off. I also number each week so that I know where we are in the school year (our school year is 36 weeks long). This schedule isn't set in stone, and we often rearrange weeks off as we go along in order to accommodate things that may come up unexpectedly, such as traveling, visits from friends or family, and fun opportunities.

Then, I make a list of all our subjects and what I want to accomplish this year. I normally consult The Well-Trained Mind at this point for the details. For example, in 4th grade we will continue our history studies in Story of the World, but we'll also follow Susan Wise Bauer's advice and take a break from our text book in order to do a 3- to 6-week study on our state history.

Next, I go through each of my subjects to figure out how many lessons or pages we need to complete each week in order to finish the book in 36 weeks, or 180 days. For example, our math book has 140 lessons, which means we can do math 4 times each week and finish on time (140 lessons divided by 36 weeks equals 3.8, or 4 lessons per week).

Other subjects neatly have 36 lessons, which means we must finish 1 lesson each week, breaking up each lesson however we want over five days.

Other text books give suggested schedules, depending on when you want to cover certain parts of the book. Our grammar text, First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, gives three different options:

Planning like this is one of the things I love most about homeschool. We can rearrange subjects and lessons based on our weekly or seasonal activities.

After decided how our weeks are going to look, I write the first week's lesson plan in my lesson plan book. You can find more details on my weekly planning here.

As for this year's curricula, here's what we'll be using for 4th grade:

Asa is 3 and a half, so we'll be starting a basic preschool curriculum this fall. While he's been doing many preschool activities already, I'll be following Sonlight's reading guide more closely. This is the same curriculum I used for Asher when he was 3.

This is Asa's school book shelf:

And big brother's school book shelf is just above:

Below these shelves I keep my general reference books, which I use to supplement their curricula or consult if need be:

I think we're all set to begin!