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Have you every gotten a new book or curriculum and wondered how much you should cover each week in order to complete it during the upcoming school year? What about your teens who you are trying to make more independent in their coursework? How much material should they be covering? This post will dig into the nitty-gritty of planning and scheduling for your homeschool curriculum.
Before you can even open those new books, you need to make some basic decisions. How many weeks do you plan to do school bookwork? Are you schooling year around, or the typical 36 weeks? Next, you need to know how many days per week you plan to work. Many who school year around will only do 3 or 4 days of "school" per week. I even had a period of time where we "did school" 6 days a week. All of these decisions will factor into how you spread out your class work.
Once you have these basics in place, you can now get to the fun part - opening your new books! Let's say that you plan to do the typical school year of 180 days, 5 days per week. This gives you 36 weeks of school. I like to give myself a little wiggle room, so I try to plan for most of my assignments to be completed in 32 weeks. Now, open your book and look to see how it is divided. There may be units, chapters, or lessons. See how many of those you have. Some books lend themselves nicely to planning and have 32 or 36 chapters. Some have 140 lessons or 180 lessons. Some have 15 units. If the book splits nicely like some of these examples above, then your job is quite simple as I will share with you here. 32 or 36 chapters would be easiest if you simply completed one chapter per week. A book that has 140 or 180 lessons would mean that you would complete 4 or 5 lessons per week. (140÷4 =35 weeks, and 180÷5 =36 weeks.) The example of a book with 15 units would mean that you can complete 1 unit every 2 weeks for a 30 week completion time frame. Some books will have more "wiggle room" than others.
Now for the more complex books. What about the book with 70 lessons or the one that has 22 chapters? Well, again, look for the number of weeks you plan to school, then work with your numbers. For the book with 70 lessons, you can plan to complete 2 lessons per week and be finished in 35 weeks. The book with 22 chapters has several options. If you want to split it evenly, do one chapter every week and a half, and you will be done in 33 weeks. If you don't like splitting up your weeks, do one chapter per week and every other week, take a week off. This finishes the book in 33 weeks. Or, you could just do one chapter per week and finish early, leaving you more time to do other things. Really, there is no limit to the options you have when deciding how to spread things out.
For my teenagers, I am working to help them take responsibility and manage their own time and deadlines. So, I take the divisions of chapters and units one step further. I split the total number of chapter or lessons or units into 4. This allows them to pace themselves by the quarter. If there are 140 lessons, dividing by 4 gives us 35 lessons per quarter. If they have 22 chapters, this gives us 5.5 chapters every quarter. Since I don't want to split the chapter up by the quarter, I may require 5 chapters one quarter and 6 another. I have found that having quarterly benchmarks for my boys keeps them on track; avoiding procrastination.