Celebrating and Looking Forward to Another Homeschool Year

 

There is a certain kind of anticipation that comes with the beginning of a new school year.

For our family, it starts long before the first pencils are sharpened or the first lesson is opened.

I’ve been homeschooling since my oldest daughter started pre-K, and over the years, the weeks leading up to a new school year have developed their own rhythm. There are curriculum choices to make, schedules to create, books to order, supplies to gather, and eventually, the day we’ve been preparing for arrives.

For me, it begins with creating a hand-curated curriculum for each of my girls.

This is one of the most time-consuming parts of preparing for a new school year. I spend weeks researching—looking through curriculum options, reading reviews, studying samples, comparing different approaches, and thinking about what will work best for each child.

I don’t necessarily use one complete curriculum from a single publisher. Instead, I pull together different resources and subjects to create a course of study that feels right for each girl and where she is academically.

After homeschooling for this many years, I’m pretty particular about what I choose. Something that worked wonderfully for one daughter may not be the right fit for another, and something we loved a few years ago may no longer suit where we are now.

So every year, I start the research again.

Once I’ve settled on our materials, I turn my attention to the schedule.

With three daughters in three different grades, creating our homeschool schedule is a bit of a puzzle. I’m coordinating three individual courses of study within one household while trying to make sure our days remain manageable.

I look at which subjects we can do together and which ones need to be done separately. I think about when each girl needs my attention, how much time each subject realistically requires, and how to fit everything into our four-day school week.

I move things around. I rearrange. I look at the week, then the month, then the entire school year.

Eventually, it starts to come together.

Of course, I know better than to think the schedule will remain exactly as I wrote it. It won’t. Someone will need more time with a lesson. Something unexpected will come up. We’ll become interested in a subject and spend longer on it than I had planned.

That’s part of the beauty of homeschooling.

The schedule gives us a rhythm, but it doesn’t have to dictate every minute of our days.

And then comes the part that has become one of my favorite traditions: the first day of school itself.

Over the years, our back-to-school celebration has developed its own little collection of traditions.

We have breakfast together.

There are back-to-school gifts.

We take our first-day-of-school pictures.

We spend time flipping through the new books and looking at all of the materials we’ll be using in the year ahead.

We have lunch together.

And then we slow down.

We spend a large part of the day looking forward to the year ahead. We talk about our goals, the things we’re excited about learning, the subjects and topics that interest us, and the things we’d like to do outside of our regular lessons.

We talk about field trips we’d like to take, activities we want to try, places we’d like to go, and experiences we’d like to have.

I think that part is just as important as the academics.

Before we start asking the girls to accomplish things, I want to know what they’re hoping for.

This year, we even took a fun back-to-school questionnaire and shared our answers with one another. Some were thoughtful, some were funny, and a few led to conversations that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

It was a simple thing, but I loved sitting around the table listening to each girl talk about herself and what she was looking forward to.

Because the first day isn’t really about getting through the first day’s worth of schoolwork.

It’s about celebrating the beginning.

This year, I set our dining room table with apple-shaped plates, pencil placemats, striped straws, composition-book name cards, and a little yellow school bus in the middle of the table.

There was fresh fruit, muffins, pound cake, breakfast sausage, and juice for breakfast. Later, we had chicken salad croissant sandwiches and tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwiches for lunch.

And there were presents waiting at each place.

Nothing extravagant. Just little gifts wrapped in bright paper to make the morning feel different from an ordinary school day.

I love that these things have become traditions for us.

The breakfast.

The pictures.

The gifts.

Opening the new books for the first time.

Talking about what we’re going to learn.

Dreaming up field trips and activities.

Setting goals for the year.

And simply spending the day together, looking forward to what lies ahead.

Some of these traditions have changed a little as the girls have gotten older, but the heart of them has stayed the same.

After all these years, I still want the beginning of a new school year to feel like something worth marking.

When my oldest started pre-K, I couldn’t have imagined that one day I’d be sitting down to plan a school year for an eighth grader, a sixth grader, and a fourth grader.

The years have gone by one school year at a time, one child moving into the next grade, one stack of books replacing another.

And somewhere along the way, these first days became less about simply starting school and more about acknowledging where we are in our family life.

There is plenty of work ahead.

There will be math problems and writing assignments and science lessons. There will be days when our carefully planned schedule works beautifully and days when it doesn’t work at all.

But before any of that begins, we take a day to look ahead.

To dream a little.

To make plans.

To talk about what matters to each of us.

And to celebrate the fact that we get another year together.

The planning is important.

The curriculum matters.

The schedule matters.

But so does the anticipation.

So does the excitement.

So does making a memory out of the first day.

And so, as we begin another homeschool year, I’m holding onto these little traditions—the ones we’ve collected over the years and the ones we’ll continue creating as the girls grow.

A breakfast.

A few pictures.

A table full of new books.

A little gift.

A long conversation about the year ahead.

And, as always, another year around the table.