Homeschool High School Planning – Syllabus and Weekly Plan

Now that we are on day 4 of our 5 Days of Homeschool High School Planning, you have all your courses chosen, resources picked, and (most likely) your schedule setup. Now we’re getting to the finer details of how each week will look!

Review syllabus

If you have chosen courses that are setup for you, there will be a syllabus or table of contents so you can find each lesson. Some materials even give you a suggested schedule, and if that’s the case, your life just got a little easier! Still, you should think ahead in how you are going to work weeks that are missing a day, like Thanksgiving week, or Eid week (if you only take a few days off).

Weekly plan

Do you want certain tasks to always fall on the same day, so each week looks relatively the same? Is it more important to you that you meet certain benchmarks throughout the year? Find what your focus is, and how your child best learns, and that can help you put all the lessons and work in daily chunks.

Based on the schedule you made, you can also decide if you’re going to do a course every day or a few times a week. It’s up to you! I know my husband had every class every day when he was homeschooling, but we tend to do most classes a few times a week (except math and grammar, historically).

Pros of each class every day

Days are predictable
Easy to know what to do every day
Work broken in smaller chunks
Easy to accomodate schedule abnormalities

Pros of classes done a couple times a week

Each day is slightly different
Larger chunks of work – can get more information in one session and can help keep the flow
If traveling one day, easier to bring work along

If you decide to have classes a few times a week instead of every day (math usually still needs to be every day), you can write down that schedule. I personally like Donna Young’s 5 column planner, and then you can write the subjects you are going to complete each day. Put it through the laminator or in a sheet protector, and you can check everything off each week as it gets done!

What if there’s no syllabus?

Some (brave) people will compile their own curriculum from various sources, which means there’s no syllabus or table of contents by the publisher to tell you where there are breaking points. If this is you, my assumption is you’ve been homeschooling for a while and you probably don’t need any advice from me. Heck, I could probably use some advice from you, hehe! Still, if you find yourself with this setup, my (untested) suggestion is to write down what you think would be a reasonable amount of work for one day with each day’s work on one line of notebook paper (or one row in a spreadsheet program). Then count how many days you have total in the end and divide that out throughout the year. If your state has time requirements, make sure you encompass that.

Also, don’t forget to add in some review and projects. Simply reading a book may not be a good way for your child to retain information. Written projects, presentations, exploring locations, and otherwise trying to bring in all their senses is a great way to imprint that information to your child for a lifetime, in sha Allah.

Tomorrow’s our last day of 5 Days of Homeschool High School Planning and we’ll be filling in the final lesson plan!