How I Plan Part 1: Pacing the Year in Microsoft Excel

I will get back to what I’m using for 3rd and 5th grade, but I wanted to take a moment to share with you how I plan. Since I do this in multiple steps, I’ll share it in various posts. Once I’ve purchased my curriculum for the upcoming year, I like to put together a pacing guide for it so I know roughly what we’ll do when. This is handy for planning field trips and homeschooling-related travel.

Figure out the school year.

The first thing I do is figure out our school year. This year, we’re starting next week, in early July, to allow us space to travel in late fall and take breaks throughout the year. You’ll want to check your state for the required school days. Most curricula have 36 weeks of lessons since most states have 180 days for school. I planned 42 weeks for 2024-2025, so besides needing to account for time off, I have 6 added weeks in our plan – I don’t usually do this, but I did it this year rather than extending 2023-2024 into summer camp time since we took additional time for grieving in January. I will log them with our 2023-2024 hours.

Knowing how many weeks I want us to be “on” for school makes it easy for me to start planning dates. I actually work backward—from the last possible day I want to homeschool—I stop before our summer camps start. Then, I mark off holidays, such as Memorial Day, a week of spring break, MLK Day, etc. I also count birthdays on school days as holidays. I add in any vacations I know we’re taking or might take, and then I come up with my start date. I add a week as a buffer for sickness, and then we’re good.

Next, set up the weekly topics.

The next thing I do will be straightforward if you’re not combining multiple curricula like I do for language arts, history, science, and art. You’ll simply follow the topics in your curricula.

Since I use Build Your Library, Blossom and Root, and Torchlight, I first have to pull out the topics (or books for older grades) and decide what we’re focusing on each week. There tends to be a lot of overlap for these curricula, so I like to line things up. To do that, the very first thing I do is decide which will be the “primary” curriculum where we’ll follow it almost as written. For our geography studies (or Level 0/K) that’s Build Your Library because I like the way it’s organized better, for history, it’s Torchlight.

Then, I’ll go through the curriculum and enter in the topic and the week that is covered by the first of the curricula I’m going through. Then I’ll go through the second curriculum. If it’s already covered, great. I’ll add the week number and call it good. If it’s not, I’ll need to insert a week (temporarily usually) to account for it. I repeat this until I’ve gone through each program for each subject.

The next thing I do is combine topics that are “smaller” or have less reading into a single week until I have my desired number of weeks. Most years, that’s 36 weeks. This year, it’s 42.

Some things won’t align, for example, Scientific Connections through Inquiry, Blossom and Root Science, and Real Science Odyssey. I chose to integrate science through the year, just assigning different days to different curricula – but you could also choose to do one first, then the next, then the third.

What About Stretching Things Out or Creating Your Own?

When stretching Build Your Library’s Prehistory Unit and Blossom and Root’s Wonders of the Prehistoric World extension unit to a year curriculum, I looked through the two, made notes of all the topics and possible rabbit holes and assigned a topic to each week. It was remarkably easy to stretch them out – even to 42 weeks.

When I create my own from scratch, I’ll choose a spine, then make a list of all the possible topics from that spine, much like I do above when combining pre-made curricula. Then, I look and see what I want to focus on, and what can be combined. Some of this may depend on what additional reading is available, too, so I’ll often do a little bit of library legwork searching the topic list for additional reading and project or experiment ideas before I finalize my topics list.

A Note About Pacing Before We Start Pacing

If you’re new to homeschooling, you likely will be in the dark as to what material your child can get through in a given time. While my pacing guides may look like a lot, I know that my kids can get through their days in less time than our local public schools most days, when they are on task. Your pacing guide will look different. While one child may take an hour to complete a single math exercise set, another might take five minutes. When I go to set up our daily work, I do it based on my estimates from how fast they’ve worked through materials in the past – with some buffer time.

What I would do is make a pacing guide for the first six weeks, see how long it takes to get through the material for the first four weeks, then finish your pacing guide based upon what your child can complete, with some space added. It’s not a race, it just helps you plan for when you need to order additional books, the next level, etc. Sometimes we wind up way ahead of my pacing guide, sometimes we fall behind. I adjust to find a happy balance between what I feel we need to get through and what they’re capable of getting through.

Planning Subjects By Week

Now we’re going to start the actual filling out of the workbook pages. Once again, I set my template up first. I list out the week number, then since we homeschool 5 days a week, I list out “day 1, day 2…” and not M,T,W,Th,F. I do this so that when we have holidays off on a Monday or a Friday, our assignments aren’t day-dependent. I also started listing out the approximate date so that if something has seasonality attached to it, I can make a point to make sure it matches the season we’ll be doing it in.

Once I have my template, I look at my map. I populate my spreadsheet following the “spine” or spine curriculum first based on their suggested pacing (or any modifications I’ve made note of to begin with). Then, I’ll add based on the other curricula I’m using. Finally, I’ll add anything else I feel they need to do and keep it at the bare bones to have an understanding of the topic – that includes spine reading, maybe an additional book, at least one hands-on project or lab, and a narration. I don’t put “additional” or “extension” reading on the pacing guide. I keep that information in Notion. That way if we fall behind schedule, I’m not trying to have them read every single additional book I found that they might possibly find interesting. I know what we need to do to cover the topics, and the additional stuff (which I add when doing the planning for the comming week) is gravy.

For things like Math, Spelling, etc., I will estimate what they will get through in a single session and put together a pacing guide based on that.

It takes time, but it’s worth it.

This takes time, folks. It’s probably the most time-consuming part of my planning process. I do it for everything we’re going to cover in a year, and at this point I do it for the full year so I can just focus on the week to week “what’s next” type planning. I feel like keeping it to the bare bones makes it easy if we want to dive into a rabbit hole on a topic to come back and cover other topics that maybe don’t lend themselves to deep investigation.

It’s a living document.

If somthing doesn’t work, if a book isn’t great, if a lab falls flat, I replace those. If I find that it actually only took one day to cover a topic I thought would take a week, I make note of that as well and record what we did. Since I use the same curricula with each child as they age into it, making notes like this helps me to avoid the same mistakes or duds with the next child. If we’re moving faster than I thought, or slower than I thought, I adjust that too.

That’s where I start with planning for the school year. For four kids and the various subjects, it does take a few weeks to get everything into it – again because I plan it all out ahead of time. June is my slow work month, so I use it to do this, that way during busy work months, all I’m doing is tweeking and planning for the week ahead. It’s worked really, really well for us so far.

In my next post, I’ll share how I use Notion for homeschool planning.