One of the questions that I often come across with regards to organizing a homeschool is, “How to make sure that you don’t miss out on any age-related content as you teach at home?”

The simple answer lies in “coursework planning.”

While homeschooling allows you the flexibility to creatively teach academic concepts as you take care of each of your child’s needs, it’s good to have some structure, and coursework planning gives you that. Let’s look at how you can plan the coursework for your homeschool. But before that, you must understand why you need a coursework plan.

Coursework planning offers several benefits, which include but are not limited to the following.

When you get started with homeschooling your children, you have no idea where you are heading. But when you create a coursework plan, you know what you wish to accomplish by the end of the month/academic year. Your coursework plan is, therefore, your basic road map for the academic period.

When you have a coursework plan for several subjects, you can find overlapping concepts. You can use this information to plan your daily lesson effectively. You can pick up an overlapping idea in, let’s say, two subjects, Science and English. Thus, you can align your science and English lessons so that each subject complements the concept you wish to teach your students.

When you have a coursework plan, you know what you want to accomplish with your students. By the end of the academic session, you may not get to everything on your coursework. However, you will know that the missed out topics are your priority for the next year. So you can use your previous year’s coursework plan to map out the content for the next academic session. Moreover, you can use this year’s coursework plan to buildup on concepts as you proceed to subsequent years.

Whether you are a super organized, busy bee homeschool mom or a laid back, go-with-the-flow type of mom, you need some inspiration to keep going with your homeschool. And coursework planning gives you that while keeping you on track (some peace of mind is the bonus you get!)

When you start homeschooling your kids, here is how you can get started with coursework planning.

Public schools in most states share their curriculum. It shows what they are going to teach each year. And if you already have such a valuable resource, why invest time and energy in recreating it? Get access to the public school’s coursework and use it as a baseline to plan out the coursework for your homeschool.

With the public school’s coursework in hand, come up with a list of subjects you want to teach your students. It could be as simple as teaching English, Maths, Science, and Arts.

Once you have the basic list, you can then break it down into specific subheadings. Here is an example.

English – Vocabulary, Reading, Speaking, Grammar, Spelling, and Comprehension.

Math – Numbers, Algebra, Arithmetic, and Geometry.

Science – Health and Nutrition, Physical sciences, Chemistry, Personal Hygiene, and Nature.

Coursework planning is typically a list of all the learning objectives for all the subjects you want to cover in an academic session.

Once you break down each subject into specific areas, you can then refer to the public school coursework and determine what learning objectives they wish to accomplish at a particular grade level. With this information handy, you can create a detailed plan of all the topics you want to cover during your homeschool academic session.

Remember, you don’t have to teach everything that has been covered as part of the public school curriculum. The idea is to use it as a reference to find out more about age-appropriate content. And once you have a baseline to refer to, you have all the flexibility to plan and teach the content the way you like.

Happy Planning!

Ashley Yeo

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