Homeschool Planner for Multiple Kids in Different Grades

Everything about homeschooling two children is harder than the arithmetic suggests, and the two places it goes wrong are both places where people expect a saving that does not arrive.

The first is money — the assumption that the second child mostly reuses the first one’s material. The second is the schedule — the assumption that you can teach two grades at once if you are organised enough.

Neither is quite true, and both are manageable once you have the real numbers. Here they are, from a worked year with a Grade 5 and a Grade 2 child in the same house.

What the Second Child Actually Costs

The year’s curriculum came to $805.93. Split it by what it was bought for:

Only 32% of the spending was shareable. Allocating half of the shared pot to each child:

• Grade 5 child: $436.22 ($308.45 + $127.77)
• Grade 2 child: $369.71 ($241.95 + $127.76)

The younger child costs 85% of the older one. Which is worth sitting with for a moment, because the planning assumption in most households is closer to 20%.

The reason is structural rather than bad luck. Look at what shared and what did not:

Content subjects share. Skill subjects do not. Math and reading are the two largest lines in almost every homeschool budget and they are exactly the two that have to be bought per child, per level, every year. That is the whole explanation for the 85%.

Two consequences worth planning around:

1. Buy skill curricula with the next child in mind. A non-consumable book that passes down costs a workbook refill in two years; a per-student online licence costs full price again. That difference is worked through in the curriculum comparison, and for a family of three it is the biggest single lever on the budget.
2. Stack the content subjects deliberately. If both children can run the same history and science, that is $126.90 in the worked year that does not double. Choosing a cycle-based content curriculum specifically so siblings can ride it together is the most reliable saving available to a multi-child household.

One File, With a Child Column

The instinct is a file per child. Resist it — it duplicates the shared purchases, hides the household total, and doubles the number of documents that need updating on a Friday afternoon.

What actually works is one file where the rows that belong to a child say so:

The “Both” value on purchases is what makes the allocation arithmetic possible later. Without it you are guessing in May which of forty rows were shared.

Logging Hours When the Work Overlaps

An hours requirement applies to each child, which means a shared block does not automatically produce two identical rows.

A shared morning of history runs 45 minutes for the Grade 2 child, who narrates a paragraph, and 75 minutes for the Grade 5 child, who reads an extra chapter and writes. Those are two different numbers on two different rows, and they are both accurate.

So: one row per child per day, with the shared blocks entered at the hours each child actually did and the one-to-one work on the individual rows. It is one additional line a day.

It also protects the total. A normal week for one child in this household logged 19.5 hours against a 25-hour-a-week requirement — a 198-hour annual gap that only shows up if you are holding a running total per child. The full arithmetic, and why finding it in week six rather than week thirty is the entire game, is in tracking hours and days.

A Schedule That Holds Two Grades

The structural problem: math and reading require you, one child at a time, and both children need both. The solution is not multitasking — it is staggering, with independent work deliberately scheduled opposite the one-to-one slots.

Three rules make this hold:

• The one-to-one slots never overlap. Each is protected by real, prepared independent work for the other child — which is a planning task, not a hope.
• Content goes in the shared block. History and science together, at 11:00, with different output expected from each child. This is where the multi-child saving is actually realised.
• The younger child finishes earlier. A Grade 2 day is genuinely shorter. Planning the afternoon as shared instruction is how families end up with two frustrated children and no one taught.

The One Number to Carry Into Next Year

Work out the shared percentage — 32% in this house — at the end of every year. It is the fastest read there is on whether a multi-child plan is working.

If shared spending is climbing, the content stacking is working and the next child will be cheaper. If it falls, you have drifted into buying separately for two children who could have ridden the same history cycle, and the budget will tell you about it in the total before you notice it anywhere else.

The pillar setup shows how the purchase list, hours log, grade record and year review connect into one file, and the full cost breakdown itemises where the $1,395.93 went.

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Homeschool Curriculum Planner & Budget — $14.99

Built as one family file rather than one file per child. The Dashboard holds your children by name, age, grade level, subject count and status, with a five-category budget summary and a live days-and-hours count — the household view that separate per-child files make impossible.

The Curriculum Shopping tab carries the child field this page depends on, including a “Both” value, across 50 rows of subject, curriculum, publisher, format, cost and purchased flag — which is exactly the column that produces the shared-versus-level-specific split and the 85% figure above. Cost Comparison keeps the options weighed per subject with grade range and format, so the reuse question is answered before the purchase rather than after it.

The Weekly Schedule is laid out per child in half-hour blocks Monday to Friday, for staggering one-to-one slots against independent work. The Attendance Tracker is 200 day rows with hours split across Math, Language Arts, Science, History and two subjects you name, so a shared block can be logged at the hours each child actually did. Grade Tracker holds per-child records with a percentage per assignment, and Year Review sets budgeted against actual by category so the shared percentage is there next June.

Eleven tabs, 541 formulas, and a worked sample family already loaded — two children in Grade 5 and Grade 2, a full shopping list, a term of hours and a set of graded assignments. Works in Excel and Google Sheets. No macros, no add-ons.

Get the Homeschool Curriculum Planner & Budget →