Unschooling Curriculum: How We Plan a Year Without a Boxed Program

Over the years we’ve gone through a lot of different curriculums and planning systems. If it’s out there, we’ve probably tried it.

We ran an eclectic mix for years and drifted further toward unschooling as my son hit middle and high school. I tried rigid scheduling first. (That lasted about a week and a half.) Then I tried recording everything after the fact, which turned out to be its own full-time job once you count the hours a kid actually spends learning things. Eventually I checked our state requirements, discovered I didn’t need written records at all, and stopped.

*Affiliate links may be present on this page. Please see the disclosure for details.

So when your homeschool isn’t traditional and nothing is going to go according to plan anyway, how do you actually plan?

Here’s the year we built, subject by subject, with what we used. Then I’ll show you how we put it together, because the method is more useful than the list.

What does an unschooling curriculum look like?

An unschooling curriculum is a list of topics your child chose, matched to resources you found, organized by subject so it can be recorded, with no schedule attached. The topics are non-negotiable once chosen. The pace is entirely negotiable, because your child could end up mastering the subject in 6 weeks or delving deep into it for 6 months – and to be honest, you won’t know which to expect until it happens.

That’s the distinction that we found worked best for us. We committed to what. We never committed to when.

A real unschooling year, subject by subject

This is an actual year from our house, not a template. Yours may look completely different, and that’s ok.

English Creative writing, story elements, and a book-writing project. We used One Year Adventure Novel for the structure, which gave my son a real framework that he could dive into, without turning it into worksheets.

Math Algebra, plus the history of mathematics, plus hands-on application through engineering projects. The history-of-math study is what made algebra interesting for both of us. We wanted to know who came up with this and why.

Science Astronomy and environmental science. Astronomy club, unit studies, and service projects. These brought us all kinds of interesting concepts to dig into.

History Military history of the Bible: culture, politics, geography, technology, and strategy across the Old and New Testaments. This was entirely his idea and it turned into one of the best years of history we ever did.

Literature Historical fiction across ancient cultures, read for historical accuracy, character depth, and plot. He got very good at catching what an author had invented.

Languages Continued Latin, started American Sign Language through a mix of home study and co-op.

Bible In addition to individual Bible study and discussion, my son worked with a group of friends to translate I Timothy from the Latin Vulgate throughout the year.

Worldview Worked through Understanding the Times as part of an online course through Hillsdale.

Electives Speech and debate, drama, karate for PE, and Game Theory.

A full schedule with no boxed curriculum. Every one of those lines is a topic he picked inside a subject I required.

How we planned it

We sat down two or three times a year with a whiteboard.

On the whiteboard went the subjects I required him to take, and beside each one, what he wanted to study for it. He was highly self-motivated, so he got real authority over what, when, and how. The condition was that if he chose it, he agreed to do it. No complaining or putting it off.

On that condition: our agreement was that he would choose to be diligent if he got to pick his studies and resources. If he didn’t, the ability to choose all of those went away – I would choose everything, and he would just have to deal with my choices. He really enjoyed having that control over his education, so I never had to push him to do any of it. He did it because he wanted to – because he was interested in learning about whatever it was – not because it was assigned.

After we talked through it all and he chose what he wanted to study, I did my part. He’d tell me a topic; I’d go find three or four resources for it and bring them back; he’d pick. That way, we both knew the curriculum was within our budget (which was necessary for me, but also important to him). He trusted that I would only pick curriculum options that would challenge him, and he got to pick which he would most like to work with. Knowing how your child actually learns makes that shortlist far easier to build.

We had two or three of these sessions each year. When we would come close to hitting the end of one set of resources, we’d pick new things to study. It worked well, and prepared him effectively for college.

If you want the wider version of this process, Tips for Building Your Homeschool Curriculum covers choosing resources for any method, and Unschooling 101 covers the philosophy underneath this process.

Why we plan by topic, not by week

Quarterly, weekly, and daily plans all failed for us, and believe me, I tried to make them work.

My son went deep. He’d stay inside a topic until he was genuinely finished with it, then move to the next thing immediately and without ceremony. Sometimes that took 4 days. Sometimes it took 6 weeks, or 4 months. A weekly plan assumes a kid moves at the speed of the teacher’s guide. He moved at the speed of his own curiosity.

So we planned by chapter, topic, or time period instead. Each one got its own cluster: books, videos, activities, projects, all listed together. He worked through a cluster until it was done, then started the next.

There’s an upside I didn’t anticipate: planning this way makes connections across subjects almost automatic. When history, literature, science, and a project are sitting in the same cluster, a kid stops experiencing them as separate classes. He carried this through college, and still works like this today as an adult.

What an unschooling schedule actually looks like

When it comes to a set unschooling schedule…there isn’t one. Unschooling replaces a time-based schedule with a topic-based sequence. The plan and your child’s curiosity determine what comes next, not what happens Tuesday at ten.

In practice a day looked like: he worked on whatever cluster was open until he hit a natural stopping point. Some days that was two hours. Some days it was most of the day and I had to make him eat.

What kept it from drifting all over the place was our whiteboard plan. He always knew what he’d committed to and what was still outstanding, so “I don’t feel like it today” was fine, and “I’ve been avoiding this for three weeks” was easy to fix.

Our favorite resources

The ones that earned their place across years, not just one:

History and literature: G.A. Henty, on audio. Jim Hodges Audio Books does the narration and they became a permanent fixture here. Henty’s historical fiction did more for our history years than any textbook.

Science, K through 7: Apologia Young Explorers. Solid, readable, genuinely enjoyable at that age. After seventh grade we moved to a mix of BJU Press and our own unit studies.

Math, K through 6: Math U See. The blocks are what made it work. For a kid who needs to make the concept concrete before it makes sense, nothing else came close. (I even caught him sneaking his lesson DVDs up to his room and watching them in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep.)

Math, 7 and up: Life of Fred. Funny, snarky, affordable, and concept-first rather than drill-first. It is not for every kid. For ours it was the difference between doing math and fighting about math.

A note on the rest: everything else on that sample year came from libraries, YouTube, clubs, co-op classes, and books we already owned. The named curricula above are the only things we bought consistently, which brings me to the question nobody puts in these posts.

What does an unschooling curriculum cost?

Less than a boxed program, usually.

There’s no single purchase. You buy a math program because math is the subject where a good sequence genuinely helps. You buy the audiobook subscription because you’ll use it every year. Everything else is assembled from the library, the internet, a co-op, and a club, and the cost lands wherever your kid’s interests land that year.

The years my son wanted engineering projects cost more than the years he wanted to read. That’s the actual budgeting model: fund the interest, not the grade level.

If you’re in a stage where budget is a real constraint right now, Creative Ways to Save Money While Homeschooling goes further into this.

Running your first planning session

You need a whiteboard or a sheet of paper and about an hour with your kid.

1. Write the subjects you’re required to cover (or that you’ll require them to cover). Check your state’s requirements first so you’re working from facts rather than anxiety.
2. Ask what they want to do inside each one. Not “do you want to do history.” Ask what part of history. What do they want to learn about, and why?
3. Write down whatever they say, including the thing that sounds unserious. Military history of the Bible sounded unserious, but we both learned a ton from it. (It also became the foundation for one of his college minors.)
4. Go find three or four resources per topic and bring them back. Then, let them choose which makes the most sense to them.
5. Group each topic into a cluster (books, videos, activities, one project) and put them in a general order. No dates.
6. Book the next session for three or four months out and let the year happen in between.

If you want the multi-year view behind each single year, Planning Long-Term Homeschool Goals covers where a sequence of these sessions is actually headed.

That’s it. Two or three of those sessions a year becomes your entire curriculum.

Every family’s schedule and curriculum is going to look different, and that’s part of the beauty of homeschooling. The version above is not a model to copy – it’s an example of what worked for us. It’s proof that a real, recordable, college-preparing year can be built out of one teenager’s actual interests and a whiteboard.

If you’re teaching a high schooler this way and the college question is the one keeping you up, Unschooling High School: Can We Do That? takes on transcripts and admissions directly.

(Originally published June 29, 2019. Last updated September 7, 2026.)