Read a lot. Observe the world around you. Talk about it.
How I plan, and why
As unschoolers we believe that learning is life. Learning can happen anywhere: in a paddling pool, in a cafe, in a museum, in a field. And anytime between the hours of 7am-7pm (after that I consider myself off the clock and very much in overtime territory). We also follow a child-led approach, so if the children are obsessed with dinosaurs, we’ll learn everything we can using documentaries, exhibitions, books, podcasts and so on. Conversely if they’re not interested in something, I very rarely push it—there just doesn’t seem to be any point forcing a resistant child to engage with something, and the learning is immeasurably better when they come to something willingly.
And yet, I plan. Why?
I think there are three main reasons.
Should the children ever go to school, I want to know that they will not be behind their peers. Of course they will be ‘ahead’ in some areas and ‘behind’ in others, but I want them to be broadly in line with school children, especially for maths and English.
Planning keeps me sane when I have a wobble about the huge responsibility of educating my own children. If they’ve had a phase of playing imaginary games all day long and I feel we’ll never open a book again, I can look at my planning file and see that, actually, everything is fine.
Planning helps me to know what to put in front of my children and what they are likely to be capable of and interested in at a given age. Although we are child-led, part of my job is to put stuff in their way and if they’re interested, run with it.
The How
My planning is very light touch and top-level. I don’t have a plan for each week or a schedule for when we’ll introduce each multiplication table. I make a yearly plan, and occasionally a monthly one.
I start in August/September, because I had a school education myself and it just seems like the time of the year for sharpening pencils and organising folders. I begin by looking at last year’s plan, and seeing what we didn’t manage. These will be top of the list for the coming year, if they are important. For example, if we didn’t make much progress on telling the time I would make that a priority, but if we didn’t learn about a particular polar explorer, I know we will have covered something else of value instead and it will probably come up naturally at some point.
Then I look at the British Government’s National Curriculum for each school year that my children are equivalent to. I hate this bit, because the National Curriculum excels at taking ten pages to say what could easily be said in one. But, it’s a start. I turn it into my own, much shorter, version. I also look a year ahead and a year behind, because people are not robots and can’t be expected to conform to a government document.
I feel that the National Curriculum gives me a baseline for what my children should be capable of. Next I turn to the curriculum of a UK fee-paying school, which offers a much more rigorous approach. I like this one a lot because it is a miracle of concision—they fit their whole curriculum for four school years onto two sides of paper. Joy! I don’t in any way replicate this curriculum, but it gives me an idea of what my children might be capable of in certain areas, and ideas for topics they might enjoy.
And then I boil it all down to a few lists and bullet points for our own purposes. It’s essentially an aide memoire for the year, and shows me the range I can expect my children to fall within. I find very little need to be any more specific about how and when we’ll cover the various topics. As one example, I knew that at some point last year we should cover telling the time to quarter to/past and half past, so I noticed and bought an Orchard Toys game in a charity shop one day, and a wipe-clean workbook in Lidl another. We have a traditional clock in the room we spend most of our time in, and the children have a digital clock in their bedroom. This has been enough for my daughter to now be confident telling the time, with very little input from me.
I find that large parts of the curriculum at this early stage (my children are 5 and 7) can be boiled down to: Read a lot. Observe the world around you. Talk about it. Kind of the educational equivalent of Michael Pollan’s ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ I think it was Ainsley Arment in The Call of the Wild and Free who said all you really need to start homeschooling is a library card (but it might have been Julie Bogart in The Brave Learner). When you’re starting out, making a plan and following a curriculum can seem overwhelming; there’s so much your child needs to know. But if you and your children are interested in the world, everything you need is right there in front of you. The curricula I use and the annual plan I make act simply as a guiding hand to keep us heading in the right direction.
In other news
My husband The Common Reader wrote this piece about the woman who invented Tupperware parties. It’s nothing to do with homeschooling, just an interesting article.
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Thanks, that’s really helpful
Hi - I meant to comment on a previous comment you wrote about reading which was very useful. I got the phonic set of 7 books on ebay for about £13 for my grandson. Talking to a retired remedial teacher, she liked the books and emphasised the importance of connecting sounds and actions to go with them as children learn most effectively through multiple approaches. Out of that discussion came the importance of poetry. Do you have any poetry books you found particularly good for three year olds - particularly boys. I am not aware of any that cover trains, diggers, space or cars??!!