Are you homeschooling a highschooler? Congratulations on making it to this point! These are some of the best years with your child. Asides from scholastics, there is so much to help them learn before launching them into adulthood. A great tool they should have in their life skills toolbox is how to schedule their own days. After all, you won’t be there to hold them accountable forever!

In high school, most children do not need constant supervision to get their schoolwork completed. Most likely you’ve been the one to schedule their work and make it accessible for them. Perhaps you’ve collected completed work each day or every couple of days for grading. Now is a great time to teach them how to plan, schedule and execute their own day!

Once they have a planner or timesheets, it’s time to start. First, you’ll need to determine how far out in advance you want them to make a schedule. I would suggest to start with a quarter’s worth of work and help them break it up into weekly increments. After this point, they should be able to estimate a reasonable amount of work to do each day. With calendar in hand, have them write in the scheduled time for outside activities, appointments, even chores, and extra enrichment activities. Then they can plug each subject into the remaining slots.

In addition, make sure to schedule a ½ hour to 1-hour time slot on Friday’s for a meeting to check their work, and gauge their progress. This is also an excellent time to help hold them accountable for how they spend their day by making the most of their time.  Do they need to cut back or do more? Are assignments falling through the cracks or are they ready for more responsibility?

Learning how to manage their own time will prepare them for college and beyond. By helping them to learn how to gauge their habits, you are setting them up for success by catching problems early on instead of allowing things to pile up. Other abilities can be worked on along the way such as organization and communication skills. While you may only have a few years left with your homeschooler, make sure to give them a good launch pad into the future with this tangible skill!

Check out a wide variety of planners at Rainbow Resource Center!