How to Create A Homeschool Schedule: Yearly & Daily Options

Once you’ve worked your way through the starting (or annual) steps to begin homeschooling – making sure you’re following the rules and regulations for homeschooling in your province, choosing a homeschool curriculum, finding a support group, etc. – now you might be wondering how exactly schedule your year and each of the days within it so that you can complete everything on the plans while still having time for any extras.

There are many different options and variations you can consider when planning out your homeschool schedule – both for the year and for the day to day implementation.

Why a Homeschool Schedule Helps

Having a homeschool schedule is useful for several reasons.

1. Everyone knows what to expect and what is expected of them throughout the day.
2. You can stay on task to complete the goals set out for the year (like completing a specific curriculum program, for example).
3. Gives your day purpose instead of letting it vanish.
4. Helps you as the teaching parent know what to do every day – especially when you are tired, overwhelmed, or juggling too many thing.
5. Kids often thrive best with some kind of structure.

Options to Schedule the Homeschool Year

The first thing to do is figure out how you want to schedule your homeschool year. At first, you might not even have considered thinking about the year over all and were only thinking of the day-to-day. But, as with all things homeschooling, you have options on how and when you teach your child throughout the year.

Follow the School Year

Some families follow the traditional school year from September – June with all the same breaks and holidays. This option allows you to sync up your learning experience with neighbours, friends, family, or even any children in your house who are going to school. If you follow this plan, it means that you know exactly when to school and when to take a break. You get a summer holiday and a winter break, plus all holidays off.

Year Round Schooling

Year Round Schooling is exactly what it sounds like. Unlike the traditional school year, you don’t take long breaks over the summer or winter, but instead school right through. This doesn’t mean that year round homeschoolers don’t have breaks at all – but when they do, it’s not for an extended period of time. They slip right back into learning. The benefits of this approach is that you are able to move at a child’s learning pace instead of trying to work within a specific grade level guideline plus there is none of the summer slide in their learning.

Semesters

This homeschool schedule divides your year into sections – typically two. Each semester includes a set of courses or subjects, changing at the division. This is a common approach used in public high school settings with four subjects a semester. The semester approach works well if topics being covered need more indepth study or your child needs to change things up half-way through the year.

Sabbath Schooling

Sabbath schooling is a plan where you do 6 week blocks of learning followed by a week of rest. This is based on the biblical example of God resting on the 7th day of creation – the Sabbath. This allows for an intentional, built in break on a regular basis, which is often an welcome rest. It also allows for some serious focus for a solid 6 week period. Often times, parents will plan during the 7th week to prepare for the next 6 weeks of learning.

The 4-Day Week

A traditional school week runs Monday through Friday. But the 4-day week removes one of those days from the intentional learning plan and sets it aside. For many families, that leaves a day set aside for play dates, field trips, appointments, and family time.

Flex School

Some families need a much more flexible schedule than the ones outlined above. Maybe they need to navigate around medical needs, an unpredictable work calendar, travel plans, etc. A flex school schedule is much less structured – you school when you can. If you know that an average school year is 180 days, you can put them whenever and wherever you would like through the year. Nothing says you can’t do schoolwork on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday for one week, follow it with a six day learning week the next, and then a week off. You choose the times and days that work best for your particular situation and needs.

Things to Consider For Your Family When Choosing a Homeschool Schedule for the Year

If you are trying to figure out which homeschool schedule you should try this year, there are some questions you can consider to help narrow down your options.

1. Do you have any children going to a public / private / online school whose schedule is already pre-set and you need to work with or run alongside that schedule?
2. Do you have friends and family that you want to match up holidays and activities with?
3. What days during the year do you know that you need to have off for holidays, special events, appointments, travel, family functions, etc? Cross them off the calendar so you can see any patterns.
4. Do you need to have some level of flexibility to your days because of a working schedule or travel plans? Do you have lots of medical appointments to work around?
5. Do you have any homeschooling regulations from your province that require you to work within a set schedule during the year?
6. Do you want or need a day each week that you can specifically set aside for outside activities?
7. What homeschool method and homeschool curriculum are you using? How will either of those be impacted by breaks or are they naturally weaved in?
8. Does your child handle long breaks well or will they get bored / not want to get started again if you stop for a while?

Options to Schedule Your Homeschool Days

Traditional School Timetable

A school day runs by a starting bell followed by several periods for different subjects at specific times, interspersed with breaks and lunch time. This tends to make a day very structured. Some homeschool families decide that they would like to run their day in a similar fashion. Here is an example of a timetable:

7:30am – 8:00am	Wake up, Get Dressed, Make Bed, Eat Breakfast
8am – 9am	Math
9am  – 10am	Language Arts
10am – 10:30am	Snack Break and Outside Time
10:30am – 11:30am	Science
11:30am – 12:30pm	Social Studies
12:30pm – 1:30pm	Lunch Break, Outside Time, and Chores
1:30pm – 2:30pm	Art & Music
2:30pm – 3pm	French
3pm – 3:30pm	Snack Break and School Tidy up
3:30pm – 5pm	Free Time

The benefits of this type of daily learning schedule is that you know exactly what to do when. There are designated time periods for all the subjects you want to cover every day and makes sure you include things like physical activity, chores, and food.

The downside is that sometimes these time periods can be restrictive and stressful – what if a child is struggling with math and they know they only have an hour to complete their work. Or what if math is exceptionally easy and they are done in 10 minutes? Then they have a lot of free time until the next topic. Having set times for set things doesn’t allow for “bunny trailing” – natural curiosity sidetrails that our kids sometimes make when they are learning, and can be challenging for some kids because it requires them to constantly redirect to a new topic when they are already focused on another. Plus, this approach can end up turning your whole day into school.

Time Blocking

Time blocking is a homeschool schedule method that designates chunks of time to specific things. Unlike the times above which are very detailed, a time block encompasses a wider range of time. For example:

Morning (8 am until 12 pm)	Homeschool Block
12 pm to 1 pm	Lunch and Chores Block
Afternoon (1 pm to 5 pm)	Free Time Block

Within the Homeschool Morning Block, your child works on whatever subjects, tasks, lessons, or activities for the day.

The benefits of this approach are that it’s fluid and flexible enough to allow for changes and moving at whatever pace your child needs to work at. It also means that you can spend time doing whatever extras that you want on a subject without the pressing need to move onto the next subject because the clock demands it. It also is adaptable, so if you come to realize that you need to add more time to a block, you can do that. Or if you need to shift the homeschool block to the afternoon of the following day because of other commitments, you can do that too. The block is moveable around the plans.

The drawbacks are that you have to do some figuring out how long a specific project will take in order to be able to set aside a block for it. For example – will 3 hours be enough for you to complete the school plans for the day? The longer you do it, the better you will be able to judge the needed time.

The “Subject-A-Day” Homeschool Schedule

Another option is to designate specific subjects to specific days. For example:

• Monday: Math
• Tuesday: Language Arts
• Wednesday: Science
• Thursday: History
• Friday: French

This means that you know exactly what you are doing each day and have ample time to dive in deep to the topics that you are covering. A drawback could be that some people don’t like making heavy subjects like math or language only once a week because they require constant practice. The biggest challenge is missing a day and pushing the subject back another week – for example, because you have art class every Wednesday out of the house, you never get around to actually doing science because you are rushing out the door in time.

One solution is to designate a set of daily subjects to complete and make the other subjects specific to days. Here is how that might look:

Daily	Math, Language, Spelling
Monday: Science	Tuesday: History	Wednesday: French	Thursday: Art & Music	Friday: History

This allows you to make sure you have covered the topics that are most important to you and still make space for the subjects that can have flexibility or don’t need to be covered on as regular a basis. However, it still can run the possibility of having lessons skipping a week because of other commitments or life situations.

Loop Scheduling

A loop schedule doesn’t designate specific subjects a day. Instead, subjects are listed in order and then worked on in that order, regardless of the day. For example, a loop plan might look like this:

1. Math
2. History
3. Science
4. Language Arts
5. French
6. Art & Music

So, on Day 1, your child completes their math. On Day 2, they do history. Day 3 is science. Day 4 is Language Arts. Day 5 is French. Day 6 is Arts & Music. Day 7 is back to math and the cycle starts over again.

This allows you to change things up every day, while making sure that you cover all the subjects you would like to include in the year, without worrying about if you need to skip a day (and therefore skip a specfic subject.) You simply keep working the loop over and over.

Some of the challenges about this particular schedule are when you need or want to have more repetition of specific subjects within your loop. One way to fix this is by adding the repeated topic more frequently to the loop, such as math, language, science, math, french, language, history.

Another is to divide your subjects into two – with a list of things do to daily and those that you can put into a loop.

Daily Subjects	Loop Subjects
Math Language Arts	Science
	History
	Arts & Music
	Science
	History
	French

A Schedule vs. a Routine: The And-Then Approach

I personally am not a fan of schedules. I prefer a routine. I don’t like times telling me what to do when. I function better with an open structure. At my house, we use a routine. Every morning follows a pattern:

Wake up, and then eat breakfast, and then do school, and then to chores, and then it’s free time.

It doesn’t matter if they are up at 6 am or 11am. They (theoretically) know the order that things run each day and what they need to do next. Their days aren’t run by a clock, but by a routine that we have used for years and years. It takes the pressure off to complete things within a set amount of time. It allows me to know what to focus them onto at every step of the way instead of scrambling to check the schedule.

Whenever I’m asked about homeschooling schedules, I will always advocate for a routine over a schedule. You can absolutely follow some of the ideas above within a loose routine. For example, when we hit the “and then do school” section of the day, I can use the planning I’ve put in place with whatever option works best for that child. Maybe I do a daily set of subjects and follow it with a looped subject before we move onto their chores. It’s totally possible to combine, mix and match, and make things work for you and your family.

In the world of homeschooling, the options for scheduling are as diverse as the learners themselves. There’s a schedule to suit every family’s unique needs. The beauty of homeschooling is in the flexibility it provides. By establishing a daily routine tailored to your family’s rhythm, you can harness the power of consistency without sacrificing the spontaneity and exploration that make homeschooling such a vibrant educational choice. So, as you head out on your homeschooling journey – remember that it’s not so much about adhering to the clock, but about finding the way that works best for your family.