Planning Your School Year

by Dena Bless
July 27, 2026

It’s time to plan your school year! Does that statement fill you with excitement or trepidation? Do you feel like an author with writer’s block when staring at your blank calendar? Take heart, my friend. Here are some ideas to ease you into the process. 

You may think it’s too intimidating to plan the whole year. Or maybe you just aren’t a planner. Either way, you’ll find more confidence as you progress through the year if you have at least a rough plan. You don’t have to schedule every minute (in fact, I would recommend you don’t!), but having an overall vision of the year helps when you’re having those “Are we doing enough?” doubts. A blueprint for the year will also make it easier to change things around and allow more flexibility when life happens and plans change.

First Things First

One of the first questions we always get asked when it comes to scheduling is, “How many school days are required in California?” Would you be surprised to know that the answer is that there is no minimum requirement? I always tell families to plan in the 170-180 range, just as a guideline, but there is no law on the number of school days that you must complete. 

And you decide how long a school “day” is. There are some days where you’ll cover eight subjects or spend hours on a field trip or project because you’re on a roll or really enjoying a topic. But many days will not be like that, and that’s ok. You’re not trying to corral a group of 30 kids of varying abilities while covering a subject. You’re working one-on-one with your child or covering material together with a few of them, who then get to dig deeper, depending on their age and ability. This freedom allows you to do more with your day and your children to explore and develop the interests and aptitudes God built into them.

Start With a School Year Calendar

I’m a visual person, so for something like this, I find it easier to use paper and pencil (always write on a calendar in pencil!) in order to see the whole picture.  It helps to start with a school year calendar (July - June or August - July), depending on which works better for you) that gives you space to write. There are plenty of examples online, or CHEA members have access to a customizable planner (as shown) that has a couple of great options in it.

Now, start blocking out the “big things” and events that are already scheduled. How much time do you want to take off for Christmas and Easter? Do you have a family trip or vacation planned? Does your family have special celebrations for birthdays or other occurrences? Do you participate in co-op classes or support group activities? 

Roughly, when do you want to start and end your year? Do you want to do year-round school with blocks of 6 weeks on/2 weeks off or some other variation? You’ll want to rough those in as well. My daughters had a lot of friends in public school and our church’s youth calendar would often follow those dates, so I’d also take that into consideration so that we’d plan to have at least a couple of days off that would overlap.

Keeping in mind the 170-180 day goal mentioned earlier, which works out to 35-36 weeks, you can now have a working schedule for your year. If there were camps or other activities that you did during the summer that you want to count toward your school year, you can just add them on to the beginning of your school year and figure them into your total days.

Lessons/Curriculum

When it comes to figuring out what to cover when, or where you should be in covering your curriculum at various points during the year, here are a few helpful ideas.

If you’re using a textbook for the basis of what to cover in a subject, remember that they were designed for classroom use, which means they have extra assignments built in to keep the kids who grasped the topic quickly busy while the teacher works with those who are struggling with the subject. You can use this fact in your planning in a couple of ways. 

First, you can plan on eliminating about 10-20% of the lessons in a textbook. Before the school year starts, go through the table of contents and figure out which chapter(s) you’re going to skip. This choice allows you to decide which parts you want to make sure you cover and thus tailor it more to your child and family. Otherwise, you may end up not covering the last few chapters, but maybe those were the ones in which your child is most interested!

Now that you know which chapters you’re going to cover this year, divide them in half for your semesters (about 18 weeks long) and in half again for your quarters (about 9 weeks of instruction). This will enable you to know where you stand at any point during the year in covering the material you wanted to. It takes out the “Are we ahead or behind? By how much?” questioning you will have during the year.

Secondly, once your child understands the concept, you can move on.  Just because there are 30 problems in a math lesson doesn’t mean he has to do all 30. Once your student has it, you can keep moving. (This philosophy also applies to quizzes and tests. Those are designed so a teacher can have an idea of how well each of her 30 students understood the lesson. But you’re doing it right along with your student, so you know when he has learned the concept.) Pacing your lessons in this way helps keep your child interested and fosters a love of learning. It also allows you to have time to spend on concepts he may not grasp as quickly.

When the Two Meet

Planning your actual calendar and when to teach your subjects will sometimes overlap. If you do have trips planned (isn’t it great being able to travel and vacation when others are tied up in traditional school?!), see if there are lessons in a subject you’re doing this year that you want to save for that time. Active learning and being able to actually see and experience things while learning about them always makes them more memorable and again fosters that love of learning we all want our children to have. Lessons can often be done “out of order” so you can have them coincide with a trip, or you can partially cover a unit to be prepared for the trip and then experience it.

Hopefully these few suggestions will be as helpful to you as they were to me in my first few years of homeschooling. As always, if you have further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us here at CHEA (including our Educational Consultant) and let us know how we can help you. Happy planning!

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Dena and her husband, Ed, homeschooled their two daughters all the way through high school graduation. She now uses her experiences to encourage and support others in realizing their dreams of homeschooling privately. She enjoys being a part of CHEA as the Events Manager and, with her husband, the Regional Advisory Board reps for the Bay Area/NorCal areas.