Homeschoolers love to make plans. We set our homeschool plans with every day strictly scheduled. But life has a way of tossing curveballs our way and next thing you know, all those carefully laid plans are wrecked.
We talk about “skipping a day” like it’s a forbidden indulgence. We stress about how it might throw our perfectly planned week out the window.
But what if there’s a way to keep your plans intact while allowing for a little wiggle room? With a little flexibility and a touch of adaptability, you can totally “skip a day” without causing any major havoc.
In this post, we’ll discuss 13 tips for not wrecking your perfectly planned year when skipping a day of homeschool. You too will find a way to take a day off from the books and pick back up where you left off. All without the guilt or stress of wrecked plans.
Can I skip a day in homeschool?
Homeschoolers have freedom to school any days they so choose. There is no US State or Federal law that says you have to follow a certain calendar and homeschool on specific days. So if you need or want to skip a school day, then do it! You have plenty of time to get the days in.
Read: 7 Types of Homeschool Calendars and How to Plan Your Own
Your state laws may specify that you homeschool for at least ‘X’ number of days each year. But these days don’t have to be all in a row, or following what the local school does. You don’t even have to follow the calendar you made at the beginning of the year! (gasp!)
So if you had planned to homeschool every Monday through Friday during the month of October, you can decide to take off some of those. You made those plans, you can change them!
Note that I am not advocating for not completing your homeschool year or not putting in the number of required days for your state. I am saying that you can decide which days you do in the year. And those days can be changed!
Skipping a day can be complicated
The homeschool world is full of every type of family with every approach to helping their kids learn. Skipping a day can bring up a complicated set of arguments between all these extremes.
One family may plan their year out strictly and hold tightly to all their plans. While another is super loose with everything and constantly flies by the seat of their pants.
So for those families who hold more tightly to planning their year, the idea of skipping a day is complicated.
But let’s face it, homeschooling your kids is hard no matter your approach to it. Keeping a consistent schedule and making sure your kids get what they need is a difficult job. But you don’t have to add more stress by making your schedule super strict.
It’s okay to take a day off when someone is sick. You don’t need to double up their work another day because they’re sick or you want to go on a field trip.
It is possible to be flexible and diligent at the same time!
Many states require 180 days in a homeschool year, and many curricula fit this as well. But you have 365 days in a year to complete all those days!
Don’t add more stress to an already difficult job by pinning yourself down. You can’t predict what life will bring you when you plan out your year.
Keep reading and get some tips to untangle the complications of skipping a day when you homeschool.
13 Tips to help you not wreck your plans
Many homeschoolers say they can’t do any homeschool planning in advance because the plans fall apart, so what’s the point? But the truth is that they don’t have to fall apart! You just have to know how to work with them.
Homeschool planning doesn’t have to be black and white – strict or super lax. There IS an in-between!
The trouble comes when you live in the extremes. You can never take a day off on one end. Or on the other end of the spectrum, you are so relaxed that you have trouble getting school days in. Diligence is important, but it is possible to be consistent with your days and have a little bit of flexibility in your schedule as well.
Here are my 13 tips for skipping a day and not wrecking your schedule in the process!
1. Learning comes in many forms
Remember that learning happens in many ways. Not only through a book. So much learning can be done through crafts, activities, field trips, and even play!
Don’t limit your homeschool day to only learning from books at a desk. This is the beauty of homeschooling – capturing learning in real life!
So if you decide to take a “day off” of homeschooling with books, it’s very likely you are not actually taking a day off from homeschooling! You can often still count the day as learning!
Here are several ideas you can count as learning for days you are having a hard time with the books:
- Go for a walk
- Go to a museum
- Play in nature
- Exercise
- Watch a documentary
- Play a learning game
- Watch an educational show
- Play a board game
- Do an educational puzzle – like a map
- Visit a historical site
- Cook something
- Design a scavenger hunt
- Listen to an audiobook
- Plant flowers
- Work in a garden
- Take care of animals
- Play a sport
- Watch the clouds or peek at the stars
- So much more!
2. Build in margin
Building margin into your schedule is helpful for many reasons. It can allow you to take off days as needed without having to change your plans. It also gives built-in room for overflow of lessons and learning outside the box.
If you decide in advance that you only do traditional schoolwork 4 days a week, it’s a lot easier to make those fun learning days happen on your off day. Or even just take a day off!
You can also plan for fun school days by building them into your monthly or annual calendar. This is easy to do by only planning lessons for 150 days of your year instead of all 180. This will give you 30 days to use for field trips, documentaries, or hiking days!
3. Personalize your homeschool calendar
Many homeschoolers follow their local public school’s calendar for the year. But this is not required! As long as you follow the general laws of your state, you can make any day of the year a homeschool day!
You can homeschool on Saturdays, holidays, and even in the evenings! You can take a whole week off every month, or even one day every week!
There are so many ways to set up your homeschool calendar to fit your needs. Personalizing the days of your homeschool allows you to feel free to fit in a day off when needed. You can easily re-work your planned days when you planned them to begin with!
4. Use a Minimum Viable Day
Using a minimum viable day in your homeschool takes off some of the pressure of schoolwork. While it isn’t taking off a complete day, it allows for a bit of a breather from the stress of homeschooling while staying consistent in your days.
This can be helpful when you would love to take off a day for a hike or just to rest, but know that if you do, the math lessons will pile up. It can be hard to take a break when you know it will just stress you more.
So take your day to the bare minimum of what is needed in your homeschool. Just do that for a day or two enjoy a bit of break. You math lessons will stay on track and you will still get a break.
5. Don’t double up
One of my pet peeves in the homeschool world is when homeschoolers say they have to double-up on schoolwork so they can go on a field trip the next day. No, you don’t. One school day is one school day. A field trip is a school day. That learning can stand on its own.
You are the master of your homeschool and the maker of your plans. Don’t box yourself in by keeping such a strict schedule that you can’t take a field trip without making your kids pay in extra school work.
Say you make a menu plan for 7 days but decide to go out to eat one day. You didn’t make one of the meals you had planned. So do you force your family to eat two meals in one day so you can justify buying the food and not mess up your menu? No! You use that meal for another day the next week.
In the same way, you can go on a field trip and enjoy yourselves without doubling up on the schoolwork. Just use those lessons another day!
6. Don’t give makeup work
Nothing can ruin the fun of a field trip like having to come home and do homework. Or make it impossible to take a sick day because then you have schoolwork to make up.
This is not public school. Don’t punish your kids with homework. Plans are easy to change.
It is possible to take a field trip and let that learning stand on its own without giving an assignment to reinforce it. It’s also perfectly fine to do the field trip without the normal daily workload of homeschooling.
So if you are feeling so tied down to your homeschool plans that you can’t do anything enjoyable without also doing bookwork, you should re-evaluate your plans. If you have anxiety about missing a school day so much that no one can even take a true sick day, take a step back.
All plans can be changed. You are the master of your homeschool. Please don’t give your kids make-up work!
7. You don’t have to give them Saturday School
Many families plan to do school Monday through Friday every week. Then one Tuesday their child wakes up with a fever. So they take the day off. In order to keep their plans in place, many families will instead do school on Saturday to “make up” the day.
When I was growing up, Saturday School was a punishment.
I understand many family’s schedules are fluid, and you homeschool any day of the week. There is nothing wrong with this. Just be sure your kids don’t feel punished for getting sick. Or for having a fun museum day! Keeping routine breaks in your days and weeks are helpful for all.
There are so many other ways you can re-work your schedule so your kids (and you!) get days off without wrecking your homeschool plans – or your weekends. Keep reading for ideas!
8. Push everything back
One of the easiest ways to deal with a day off from homeschooling is to simply take the day off, push all the lessons back to the next day, and then pick up where you left off the following day.
While it seems so simple and ultimately is, putting this into action can prove to be complicated for homeschoolers who like to plan everything in advance.
Maybe you write down everything you plan to do each day. If you don’t get to it all, then there’s lots of erasing and crossing things out – wrecked plans.
Here are a few ways I have found to deal with this:
- Don’t attach your lessons to a certain date
- Use a school day instead of a date, like day 142
- Write in pencil or erasable pen
- Use a list of lessons you simply cross out each day
- Don’t plan far in advance
- Use a digital planner that’s easy to move lessons
9. Add an extra day
If you have 180 days planned out in your homeschool year and want to take a day to play games, keep your plans in place by just adding an extra day! There is nothing wrong with schooling for 181 days. Or 200!
You may plan on being done with your school year on May 15, but there is nothing wrong with adding one more day and ending on May 16 instead. Take your fun day, complete your planned days, and add an extra day to the end of the year.
You are in charge of your homeschool plans. Just keep it simple and stress-free. Add an extra day!
10. Skip it altogether
Another easy way to deal with your homeschool plans when you want to skip a day is to just do it. Simply skip the day! Many lessons can easily be skipped without losing the information. So much in a curriculum is redundancy and reinforcement of topics.
You might find that skipping the lesson you are on won’t work well. But maybe tomorrow’s lesson can easily be skipped! Keep your plans flexible and make them work for you.
Not every subject can easily be skipped, so use this option as a tool in your toolbox to pull out as needed.
11. Shorten lessons and combine
If you really can’t get past the idea of changing the plans you have made, then a simple approach to not wreck your plan is to shorten lessons and combine them. If you want to take tomorrow off, just take today’s lessons and tomorrow’s lessons. Look at them both and pull out what is unnecessary. Teach it all today.
You can shorten lessons by summarizing the teaching rather than reading word-for-word. Or you can simply remove the redundancy of the lessons. Use what is left for the combined day’s lessons.
Perhaps you have a math lesson scheduled for each day. Summarize the new information from each lesson and give a few practice problems from each lesson. Many lessons have similar review problems anyway.
Of course, not every subject can easily do this, so using this option as one of the tools in your toolbox can help you finish the job.
12. Keep it flexible
Ultimately, the only way to not wreck your homeschool plans and still be able to skip a day of school is to keep your plans flexible. This is not only a mindset, but also has some practical applications.
With a flexible approach, you have to understand that your plans are made by you, therefore can be manipulated by you. Nothing has to be set in stone. And for that matter, your curriculum should also be highly flexible. You don’t have to do it exactly the way it says to out of the box!
In a practical sense, here are some ways to keep your plans flexible. Many of these have already been discussed above, but are worth mentioning again:
- Don’t attach your lessons to a certain date
- Use a school day instead of a date, like day 126
- Write in pencil or erasable pen
- Use a list of lessons you simply cross out each day
- Don’t plan far in advance
- Use a digital planner that’s easy to move lessons
- Build in margin to your plans
- Personalize your homeschool calendar
- Not everything must be learned from a curriculum
For more thoughts on keeping your plans flexible, check out my post about how to have a flexible homeschool schedule.
13. Be diligent when you can
The best way to prep your homeschool so you can easily skip a day without guilt is to be diligent when you can. On the days you know you can make the work happen, do the work. Save the extra days for when you really need them.
If you know the stomach bug is going around, get some good school days in before it hits. If you are talking about taking a trip away for a couple of days next week, be sure to get a full week in this week.
I know my family likes to take a day off here and there for camping, short trips to see family, and other fun trips. I don’t want to have to worry about getting our homeschool days in later in the year, so we start our homeschool year in July instead of August or September like many families.
And we are diligent with school when we are well and at home. I try to limit the days we take off because we “don’t feel like it”, though that could be a completely viable reason.
This way, while we are on a trip, I don’t have to think about what can count as school or feel guilty for taking time off. I have prepared in advance for this. I have built-in extra days into our year for days off and we’re diligent with homeschooling when we can.
Skipping a homeschool day
Skipping a homeschool day is possible, even with carefully made plans. If you are diligent when you can be and flexible when you can’t be, your homeschool can continue without the guilt of any missed homeschool days. You can take a day off from the books and not wreck your plans by weaving a little adaptability into your plans.
Remember that you are the maker of your homeschool plans, so you can also change the plans. Don’t be afraid to make them yours!
Have you had trouble skipping a day in your homeschool for fear of wrecking your plans? How do you make it work? Let me know in the comments!
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