I first read about this brilliant concept from Julie Bogart’s The Brave Learner book, and it was so incredibly freeing! It felt wonderful to “have permission” to not stress and plan my life away in order to homeschool! I can spend my time actually teaching and learning with my kids, instead of just planning to… imagine that!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of planning from behind with homeschooling, it is when, instead of spending time to write in what you will be teaching all week/month/year in a planner, you write down what you actually accomplish in the planner as you do it throughout the day. No getting stressed and having to draw arrows and erase and re-write and scratch out things in the planner if things don’t go according to plan. Instead, your record is what you actually did on the actual day you did it.
I will say I do have a game plan for every day, so we aren’t unschooling. There is a rhythm of our day in my head, but my brain doesn’t store the details. The details work themselves out throughout our day and get recorded in the planner.
Speaking of the planner… it’s been three weeks since it came in the mail and I’ve geeked out over it! It’s a custom-made Plum Paper planner*, and I LOVE it! You can find a little bit of a virtual flip-through in my instagram post.
I’ve gotten a few questions about how I personally make planning from behind work for me, so I thought I’d just explain the process that my brain goes through every day we do school.
I plan from behind by doing the next thing. I know we are going to do some enrichment basket, LA, Math, and either Science or History every day. Each of those things has its own pattern. So I simply follow the pattern based on the day before.
The way our LA rhythm works is: read aloud/journal/play (Blossom & Root), read aloud/narration/play (B&R), word game/reading word list/mini poem (B&R), copywork/a lesson from The Good and the Beautiful/free write. So, yesterday, was a read aloud/narration/play day, so I know today is going to be a word game/reading list/mini poem day. So I go to the relevant places: the next section of the book, the next list, the next poem worksheet. We do them. We write those pages, lists, etc. down in the planner.
And we do the same with everything else we do: math, science… even our enrichment basket. (I know some people don’t record what they do in the basket in their planners, but I do. Our enrichment basket covers art, music, poetry, nature study, growth mindset, habit training, Bible, life skills, Spanish, and handicrafts. Some of that is covered every day we do the basket. Some of it is looped. But either way, I think it is worth writing down and noting that we are incorporating those learning areas in our lives.)
So, that’s it. I follow our rhythm (basket, LA, Math, science or history), do the next thing, then right it down.
And it completely works for us! I KNOW and feel confident in the fact that I am keeping a good record of work for my children, yet enjoy that I don’t have to spend hours writing it all in just to feel disappointed or like I’m failing if I have to rearrange it for some reason.
It’s just another way that I’m determined to keep the essentials/most important in my life– and in our homeschool journey, that’s not just what I plan, but actually HOW I plan, too.
* If you’d like to try Plum Paper for yourself, feel free to use my referral code and get a discount!
embracing essentialism 