How to Create Your Perfect Daily Homeschool Schedule

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When I first started homeschooling I just knew that we could homeschool, do the daily chores, let the children rotate through playtime together, and even get the daily baths done by noon. But it never quite worked out. I couldn’t figure out why until I sat down to create a daily homeschool schedule.

How to create a daily homeschool schedule.

Daily schedules provide the backbone to your well-run homeschool. It creates a daily routine the children know to follow from the time they wake up until bedtime.

You may be thinking, I like routines, not schedules. But a well-thought-out daily homeschool schedule gives you a working routine. Just remove the times along the side! And we begin with a schedule so you don’t fall into the trap I fell into, trying to shove 7 hours of work into 4 hours of time.

Write Down What Everyone Needs to Do

First, take a few notes about what you want to do and what your children need to do each day. Generally, I find that I have 27 hours of tasks to complete each day. There’s no way I’m going to get everything done, so I have to cut.

The kids generally have a few hours of work but plenty of free time. Indeed you might say too much free time!

This is just to get a general idea of what needs to be on the daily homeschool schedule.

Look at the Weekly Schedule

The weekly schedule should give you a flow for what the various days look like. In my house, there are no regular activities until after 2 in the afternoon. On the other hand, you may find that you’re running a child over to the swimming pool for swim team practice every morning or dropping a teen off at the local college.

These activities should be planned into your daily schedule.

Ignore all irregular activities at this time. These are any once-a-week activities that appear sporadically in your weekly schedule. For instance, on Monday there’s an activity at 1 pm and on Tuesday another activity at 3 pm. Don’t worry about planning these into your daily schedule. They’re exceptions to the rule.

If you have an activity such as a co-op which should up two or three times a week, you might consider creating a schedule A for co-op days and a schedule B for non-co-op days.

Create a Spreadsheet

I create a simple spreadsheet with the times down the left-hand column in 30-minute increments. Basically 7, 7:30, 8, 8:30, etc.  Well, actually I’m lazy. I usually write the hours and skip a row in between. It works!

In the top row of the spreadsheet, I label the columns Time, Mom, Child 1, Child 2, Child 3, etc.

Creating a daily schedule provide the backbone to your well-run homeschool. It creates a daily routine the children know to follow from the time they wake up.

You don’t need to use the entire 24 hours a day, although you can. I prefer to start from my wake-up to my bedtime. After all the children go to bed before I do and wake up after me.

Insert Obvious Times

create a daily homeschool schedule

Just as on the weekly schedule we began with the obvious times, do the same with the daily schedule. Start with rising and sleeping times and then move on to meal times. I also add quiet time at this point.

There are always parts of your routine that are working well for your family. Remember the adage

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Add the working parts to your daily homeschool schedule. Only fix what needs to be fixed!

Add Homeschooling

As you add the times for homeschooling, don’t just write down homeschool. Be specific. Write down when you plan on sitting down with each child, when will they be doing independent work, when will the kids do math, and when will you read aloud to them.

Don’t worry about getting it perfect. A well-run homeschool is never a perfect homeschool.

Remember that kids don’t have to be involved in homeschooling the entire time. You can have two children playing together while you work with a third. Children can enjoy free time, computer time, or hobby time during homeschool hours.

Add Household Chores

A well-run homeschool is also a tidy homeschool. It may not pass a white glove inspection, but there’s room on the tables for science experiments and art projects. You can find the math books.

The living room is cozy for read-aloud and long discussions.

Add the time you need to run the house. This includes cleaning the house, an evening tidy, meal prep, and cleaning the kitchen after meals.

Add in Everything Else

Now that you’ve added times for homeschooling and caring for the household, it’s time to add the other daily activities into the schedule.

Do you have time to read and enjoy hobbies?

Plan time to exercise, enjoy time with your husband, a relaxing evening with the family, and time outside.

Add times for the children to play, explore, and create. Don’t worry about filling up every minute of the day. A bit of boredom can inspire children’s creativity.

Remember to Add Margin

I think we’ve all made the mistake of blocking off times too close together. We end up rushing through the day from teaching our first graders math to frantically trying to get dinner on the table.

Add margin to your day. Plan for a few extra minutes to deal with the crisis. After all the baby’s diaper may explode in the middle of a read-aloud. The mechanic may call, a child may be in tears over a math problem they can’t solve, breakfast may burn.

As a mom of a large family, I have countless minor crises I need to deal with every single day. I can’t stress enough how important it is to add a few minutes throughout the day to deal with a crisis and still stay on schedule.

Last Thoughts on a Classical Education Homeschool Schedule

Remember the daily homeschool schedule is simply to give you a practical idea of how your day will flow. If you loathe schedules and hate routines, remove the time column after you’ve created the schedule. There’s no reason to be tied to a structured time schedule.

Before you decide that’s it’s hopeless, give your new schedule or routine a couple of weeks. You and your kids will need a few days to get used to the new routine before it will flow smoothly. However, you should find that your life is much more peaceful now that everything has a scheduled time.

If you’d like more help creating your ideal schedule, check out Managers of Their Homes. There’s a lot of useful in-depth information on creating a schedule for your family.

Read more in the 31 Days to a Well-Run Homeschool Series!


5 Comments

  1. I have struggled with this idea because we basically have a M/T/W/Th school week. Then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are all very different from each other. I’ve aimed for routines surrounding meal times because those are pretty regular. But I can see, especially with my sensory kids, they NEED to know what to expect so we have a “school day” routine and a “not school day” routine. The hardest part for me is that I tend to get caught up in perfectionism until something goes wrong and then I jump off the cliff of “forget it all and lets just go the park”!

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