Homeschool Pacing Guide Template: Planning Your Own Course of Study

Download this free homeschool pacing guide template to plan your lessons and schedule your own course of study for the week, month, or the whole year!

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Homeschool Pacing Guide Template: Planning Your Own Course of Study

I have created the next installment of my free homeschool planner system: a HUGE set of pacing guides (a.k.a. course of study). These are blank forms that you can use to plan out a week, month, or year in advance.

Many homeschool parents use pacing guides to create a general overview of how their week, month, or year will go. Having an organized document showing your plans helps you and your children maintain focus. It also ensures that you get things done in a timely manner!

This pacing guides set is the perfect complement to my current planner series. I release a new addition every year – and they always complement each other. That way, you can create ONE binder, use it from year to year, and reuse pages for multiple children who follow the same curriculum down the road. It’s all about convenience, simplicity, and easy on the printer ink!

This printable file includes templates for the following:

6 weeks
9 weeks
12 weeks
9 month-year
10-month year
12-month year
34-week year
36-week year
40-week year
52-week year

I tried to include as many types of planning years as I could think of! Let me know in the comments if there’s one that I have missed. I may add it to later revisions.

How do you use a pacing guide or course of study?

If your curriculum has one already, you don’t need one! However, if you are a frugal homeschooling mom, you probably pick and choose from different curriculum options. You may piece together multiple resources, including things you find on the internet. It can get complicated.

Research and find out what to teach and when to teach it. What subjects, goals, and ideas do you wish to teach by the end of this week, this month, or this year?
Write those things down and prioritize them. What’s most important? What will you spend the most time on? What can’t be skipped in favor of other things?
Use a pacing guide or course of study template, and fill it in with the goals you plan to achieve.

I have been working on writing out how I schedule my homeschool days with multiple young children.

Optional: Create Your Own Pacing Guide

If you feel up to it, you can easily create your own pacing guide inside a simple spiral notebook. Use the lines to help you differentiate between days, weeks, or months.

I have a general plan laid out for the year for each subject/skill I plan to teach my kids. The very first thing I do is use a “Scope and Sequence” or “Plan of Study” approach. Basically, I look at how many lessons are in each curriculum and spread those lessons out over the course of the year. Simple, really!

Example: A 180-day Homeschool Year

To illustrate, I choose to follow a 180-day school year. I spread out the lessons and tasks I intend to teach throughout the year, to give myself a guide for staying on track over those 180 days. This prevents me from getting overwhelmed with all I must accomplish and also keeps me from getting too far behind when I take days for field trips, playdates, or when the kids have extended visits to the grandparents’ houses. This spring, I am already planning early in this way for the next school year (Did you know that you can save money by planning your curriculum purchases early?).

Here I’ll share the pacing guide for the 4/5-year-old I will be teaching this coming year. I’ll be using A Beka’s 4-year-old Kindergarten curriculum with her for the subject of Reading/Phonics. It contains 170 lesson plans, but I will only have her in my home on 4 days per week most weeks, and I homeschool following our county’s public schools’ calendar, which is 180 days. So, I’ve used my free A Beka lesson planning sheets to spread out A Beka’s 170 lessons among the 180 days in our homeschool year. However, I’ve also allowed for a 4-day per week school week for her.

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Entire Homeschool Planning System – FREE!

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