Count all of your 'no school' days. You will also want to include a few sick days in your final count so you can plan ahead for this contingency. Find out your state's requirement for 'days of school' then count that many days ahead on your calendar starting with your first day of school. Add as much time at the end of your year that you can comfortably add, to cover life events that may happen during the school year, then mark a final day of school. By the time you finish this exercise, you should have a fairly accurate representation of your school year even though you do not necessarily know which days off your children will be taking.

Next, you will want to divide those days into 'weeks of school'. If you school four days per week, divide your final count by four to find out the number of 'weeks of school'. If you school five days per week, divide your final 'days of school' by five to determine your 'weeks of school'. Let's say that you have 180 days of school and you school four days per week. Divide 180 by 4 to get 45 'weeks of school'. If you school five days per week, divide 180 by 5 to get 36 weeks of school.

Once you know how many weeks of school you are going to be homeschooling, you can easily divide your school work into those weeks. Where many homeschoolers get off track is that they feel like a week has to start on Monday and go straight through to Friday. If you are doing 'weeks of school', the week starts the next school day after you finished the previous week's work, whether it is Monday or not. Take off the days you planned to take off, no matter where in the week the day off falls and just continue doing the week's work the next day. You have well planned your days off so don't worry that you are getting behind. Just pick up where you left off on your next day of school. Once you have finished all of the weeks of school, you have finished your school year.

If you are interested in purchasing a home school lesson planner that uses this method, see The Full-Year Notebook System.