Homeschool Planning 101: Setting Your Goals (Part 1 of 3)

Homeschool Planning can be a joy or a dread. Some mothers thrive in this area. They spend the whole summer gathering books, making lists, and printing out everything they could possibly need and more, with great ease and joy.

For others (me included, at times) this can be a great chore, a seemingly sterile duty, a dread, it can bring on great fear and even become a curse. We might even put it off until literally the last minute (i.e. the first the first day of school). I am writing this series to take the dread and drudgery out of this duty and hopefully breathe life and excitement into your next school year…even if you thrive in this area.

I will be very honest with you: I have not always been successful at keeping my plans. Life happens, and when it does it can throw you some real curve balls. Sickness, death, deployments, change in schedules, toddlers, babies, pets.  All of these things can get us out of our normal schedule and keep us off course if we let them.

But that is the key isn’t it—us letting them? We can and should learn to work around, even with, these life issues (as most of them are good) and succeed in our homeschool plans.

We have to make a plan, because without a plan we will fail.We will have life’s storms deviate our path, and it can often cripple us and our children. I am not meaning to sounds so depressing, but I think to some degree we have all experienced this kind of year (or years) and have felt incredibly empty and down because of this. I hope that this series will give you something to be joyful and excited about.

So where do we start?

Preparing Your Way and Theirs: Look to Jesus

The first and best place to start is on your knees. You may think you know what your year, month, or next day will look like, but only the Lord knows best. And only He knows your family more intimately than you do. He knows each one of your children, your husband and you. He knows what His plans are for all of you, they are for peace and good, an expected pleasant end.

It is easy to get caught up in the next best thing, the latest and greatest programs and curricula, what your amazingly scholarly friend is doing with her children, even your own plans, but all of these need to be laid down at the foot of the cross. Remember these things can quickly derail us.

Let the plans come from the Lord, not the last homeschool conference you went to or the latest thing you saw in the blogosphere. I am not saying these are not good tools or spring boards for ideas. The Lord can faithfully use these in our lives to prod on to greater living for our family, but if you are not hearing Him, you will fall and feel miserable by doing the wrong thing.

However, there is still no need to fear because He is more than able to fix our mistakes. I am proof. No matter where you started and how you have failed or succeeded, He needs to be the ultimate authority over your lessons and goals for the long term.

Keeping The Plans Before Us

Here is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. While most of us can plan one homeschool day with ease, but what about a full week, term, semester, or year? Can it all be done before you start or is it a futile endeavor to even try? These details will be hammered out in the next few blog posts, but for now we need to have our goals in place so we can plan for the future.

We need to get our lofty thoughts and God given plans substance.  This means that we need to write them down and revisit them.  For most people, writing or typing can make ideas come to life.  Doing this keeps us accountable because it is as if we spoke it aloud to a friend.  It also gives us a more tangible goal that we can use to schedule our days and measure our success with.

Science has shown that when we just think about things (and keep pondering them) it can bring us stress.  It’s as if we repeatedly perform that action in real life when all we are doing is ruminating over “it” without actually completing the task. Getting your thoughts on paper will not only ease your stress but will free up powerful brain space to accomplish important tasks, enjoy life, love on those precious children, and enjoy your husband.

If these weren’t reason enough, we also forget. It’s one thing to have an epiphany about the perfect way to teach your 9-year-old her multiplication tables just to have forgotten what it was when the time comes to teach or write out the plan.

Between easing our stress and needing to keep our thoughts for our plans, we need to put these plans in a safe place.

Our options:

• Keep a journal dedicated for homeschool ideas with you
• Keep a folder with scrap pieces of papers for these ideas
• Use your PC for notes
• Write the ideas in your personal prayer and quiet time journal
• Many phones have a place to keep notes too

Make it work for you.  Once you get these ideas going, they will keep coming.  The Lord is faithful.  Take the time to pray over all these as you plan, when you get ready to use the method or idea, and while you are in the midst of that hairiness of homeschooling that is so blessed to be a part of.

What Are Good Long Term and Short Term Goals?

All of these great ideas and plans lead us to the end result: the goals.  We need to have short term and long term goals.  These can be difficult to set, but they need to be in place so that our plan and ideas can match that ultimate end.

Long Term Goals

Where do you want your children to be at the end of their time with you?  This should be your first and largest picture as you teach your children.  What does this mean?  Well, what are the most important things that should be a part of who they are so that they can enter the world without needing you?  Think about this.

These goals include habits and technical skills, for example:

• character: integrity, courtesy, manners, kindness, loyalty, reverence, etc.
• personal hygiene
• self-discipline: this is needed for all skills in life
• music appreciation and technical ability
• life skills: ironing, cooking, cleaning toilets, grocery shopping, etc.
• how to fix certain things around the house (both young men and young women need these kinds of skills)
• ability to self teach
• read, write, arithmetic, public speaking abilities, etc.

We want habits and skills that keep our children from being a social outcast.  This seems to be something that homeschooling families seem to neglect because we can often see society as an enemy.  However, this does need to be a focus.  How can we reach the world for Christ if we cannot relate to them? This needs to be a priority but not necessarily with the same emphasis and ways that the world uses.

In fact, if you google “habits list” (especially “Charlotte Mason Habits”) you will find a slew of great ideas that will help your children become healthy adults.  Some habits and skills I am sure you never thought about.  With these lists, you will find helpful tips to enabling these habits to become reality in your family’s life.

Don’t let these lists overwhelm you.  Remember?  Let the Lord reveal your steps.  But you need to have a simplified version of these goals as you main focus on schooling.  Ultimately it can all be summarized in this phrase: “We are not raising children, but adults.”  Think along these lines as you plan and pray looking for opportunities to bring these about in your children’s and your life.

These are all long term goals.  These larger broader goals need to be brought down to size.  They need to be broken up into bite sized pieces so that we can digest them and make them a part of us.

Short Term Goals

This is where we are going to head in the next couple of segments, but for now start thinking about your long term goals with these short term ones in mind as well.  Get your ideas on paper and write with them some simple and practical steps that will being results in your families life.

Short term goals are basically the nitty-gritty details of your terms, months, weeks, and days. This means making lists of your long term goals, finding a place for them to fit in the grand scheme of things and when that can’t seem to happen, your day will provide you plenty of opportunity to make some of them happen.

For instance:

Do you find that your children need to work on kindness?  A quick and easy way to bring this into school and practice is to have them copy scripture. You are working a couple of different subjects by doing this:

• the character trait that you desire is going to be brought to light as your child copies this verse. You often do not even need to point out what is wrong, they know where they have gone wrong already. What you can do to get them to think a little more critically is to ask them what ways they see kindness from others and how they can be kind
• they are practicing their handwriting and doing copywork
• they are in essence memorizing scripture; as they complete the verse you should definitely have them review this often so that it can count as memorization
• you could have them come up with a little jingle or poem or listen to music about kindness
• they can practice kindness throughout the day by helping one another with chores or look for ways to be kind (attentiveness!)
• you can talk about the ways that you read of kindness in the literature, history or anything else that you are covering that day

I am sure you creative mamas (and fathers) can come up with many more ideas than this.  The key is to fit it into you days and write what you have done.

You will end up having a your long term plans laid out, with these, you will have your shorter goals and plans filling in the blanks, then you will include what you do in reality.  Life is not pre-planned but will afford you with ample opportunity to fill in the details of how your family’s days and doings really are your school.

Remember, I am praying for you and for me!

P.S. Life happens!  So let’s say you have had a plan and you just don’t feel like you can do this again this year or at this moment.  Take a look at my last post How to Plan a Successful Homeschool Day When Life is Busy

Let’s chat:  What are some long term goals you have for your children?  How have you made this tangible? What help can we give you to plan and make things more doable in the day-to-day homeschool hairiness?

The Rest of the Series…

Part 2: Define Your Focus and  Schedule

Part 3: Putting Your Plan into Practice