Planning for a New Homeschool Year: Phase 3 – Curriculum Development, Part 2.

Following a period of reflection on this current homeschool year (2024-25) — which, for us, spans the months between September and May — I began strategizing for the year ahead (2025-26).

I like to start this process of curriculum development and planning early in the spring to give myself time to prepare without feeling rushed. Our family kicks off summer break early in the year — around mid-May. We spend our summers traveling, camping, and learning through real-life exploration of the world around us. The last thing I want to have hanging over my head during the summer months is the stress of knowing that I do not yet have a plan for the fall.

So, beginning in January and February —

I consider the next steps in our learning plan.

I set new (and tentative) academic goals for the year ahead.

I think hard about what is working and what we need to change.

With that in mind, this year, I settled on three interest-based topics that will guide our learning through the next year. These are topics I know will hold my boys’ interest for a long period of time and provide me ample opportunity around which to develop comprehensive learning units.

These three topics are:

1. Dinosaurs

2. Sharks

3. Cars

Both my (almost) two-year-old and my seven-year-old will be fully on-board with these topics!

I already know I will have complete buy-in on anything I want to do that centers dinosaurs, sharks, or cars.

And that’s totally fine! I can build some kickass learning units around these topics. That’s the beauty of interest-based learning — you can still hit every learning objective while maintaining student engagement.

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After settling on these three topics, I spent a solid month scouring the internet for related learning materials.

I cast a wide net for hands-on STEM projects, math and phonics worksheets, coloring pages, educational games, sensory bins, and arts and crafts.

Websites like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers are helpful. Many of the resources available on those sites can be downloaded as freebies. There are also A LOT of bloggers out there who run preschools or after-school programs, or who are homeschool moms themselves.

There are so many sources from which to pull ideas! (And then, if you have a child who requires you to adapt their learning to a high degree — as I do — you can jump off from that starting point.) There is no need to recreate the wheel.

I made a few trips to local thrift shops where I found cheap board games, puzzles and other educational items that I could tie to several of our academic goals around problem-solving, language and communication, occupational therapy, and social-emotional learning.

I also sourced several second-hand books from dealers on Amazon, which are comprehensive enough to serve as whole-unit “textbooks.” We will pull excerpts from those materials as we work our way through our learning on each topic.

Thrift stores and used books for the win!

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When I felt like I had accumulated sufficient resources to create a multi-week curriculum, I pulled out my calendar and made step-by-step lesson plans for 2 to 4 days each week, for 6 to 8 weeks on each topic.

These daily lesson plans include work on all of our academic subjects, plus therapies and preferred activities.

Each lesson plan incorporates gross motor/physical therapy exercises, plus more general outdoor play or movement activities, such as themed kids’ yoga classes or songs and dancing.

There are daily readings and books, as well as educational videos, and always, activities that incorporate practice in communication using my older son’s AAC (assistive technology) language device.

Letter, number and shape identification are included, in some form, as part of our daily work, as are fine motor/occupational therapy or adaptive living skills, such as cutting, coloring, molding, mixing or stirring, etc.

There is also, at least, two “fun” (preferred) activities included in the lesson plan that give us a “break” from the harder stuff. These include fun science experiments, messy sensory bins, hands-on exploration, art projects, or outdoor excursions.

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It is now mid-May, and I am already completely done with my lesson planning for the whole of the 2025-26 school year.

It feels good!

Bring on the summer!