It sounds odd to hear and to think about how you would plan your homeschool when your homeschool style is unschooling or eclectic. Many school boards require you to submit a plan to your school board it doesn’t hurt to plan even just a basic outline, the outcomes that you are hoping for your children to achieve.
How to Plan Your Unschooling or Eclectic Homeschool
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In Saskatchewan, Canada, I need to plan educational outcomes, what I want my kids to learn by the end of the year, and what materials we’re planning to use to achieve those outcomes. I mainly just say books and perhaps an online site.
Some provinces are more open to unschooling than others so you’ll have to look for more information on that and contact your home education school board member.
What would be the first step to planning out your unschooling year? Here are some ideas on how to plan unschool:
Interest Lead Homeschooling
Ask your kids what they want to learn about. They may be interested in learning about space for example. You would then think/plan out some projects to do that are fulfilling their interest in learning about space, as well as learning some of the basics such as math and language arts.
In actuality, unschooling is interest lead, you don’t have to plan anything, just go with the flow.
Homeschool Calendar
Grab your calendar and note down all the holidays or events that will be taking place during your school year, whether that is year-round, the topic school months, etc.
For example, Christmas is in December, February is Black History Month.
What events or activities will you and your family be doing, such as in May/June we will be planting a garden.
I used my Create 365 – Happy Planner, the blank squares are perfect for filling in different time slots to fit our needs.
Following the Public School
We often school along with the public school system timeline. We usually break when they do – Christmas break, Easter break, and summer. This is simply because all the girls’ friends are now in public school. It makes having friends over easier this way. But we don’t stick to it strictly.
Every Days Learning
Here we don’t have to account for days that we homeschool. But make sure that if you live in a province/state that does require a certain amount of time (180 days for example), you plan your homeschool for those days.
Maybe you want to only do school 4 days a week instead of 5. Personally, this works the best for us:
- Monday and Tuesday for school.
- Wednesday for grocery shopping, library, playground, etc.
- Thursday and Friday for school.