Either way, you are likely starting to think about the upcoming school year, whenever that is for your family.

Did you take advantage of our free Homeschool Yearly Planning Packet? If not, download it today to get several printable forms and instructions for planning out your new school year.

I know homeschool parents love to hear about how other homeschoolers “do school,” so I thought I’d share today how I personally determine my school year and term dates.

In our home, we do the traditional 2 semesters/4 quarters. We usually take 2 weeks off between each quarter and 4-5 weeks between the semesters. This means that the school year is a little longer, with a shorter summer break.

This may seem strange, but I actually start my planning from where I want the 2 semesters to break. I like to end at least 2 weeks before Christmas and start the 2nd semester a week or two after New Year’s. We typically travel for a few weeks during this time, so it works out nicely this way.

Using the calendar in the planning packet, I started by asking myself when I want to end the first semester. I then crossed off other days we’ll not do school (Thanksgiving, Labor Day, etc.) and counted backwards 9 weeks. This was the beginning of our 2nd quarter.

I then went backwards another 2 weeks for our end-of-first-quarter break, then backwards another 9 weeks for the beginning of the first quarter and the school year.

I repeated the process for the 3rd and 4th quarters, but moving forward from the semester break instead of backward.

After over 20 years of homeschooling and tweaking many things during that time, I’ve found that this schedule works the best for us, at least during this stage. And one of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that we can be flexible to do what is best for our own families!

As you plan out your new school year, if you’d like to make the recordkeeping side of things easier, consider utilizing Diligent Homeschool’s recordkeeping system.

If you’d like to have a place where you enter your kids’ assignments one time and have lesson plans, daily task lists, reports cards, and transcripts automatically generated for you, then this system is for you!

Read more about our special features or try out the free demo.

As always, we love to hear from you and get your ideas for improvements we can make to the system that will make your life easier. Send us an email from the Contact Us page or leave a comment below.

Here’s to a great new homeschool year!