How does the home education schedule work?
Your home education schedule in Willowfolio is a soft frame, not a school timetable. You use it to hold the shape of your week (classes, trips, home sessions for self-directed learning at home, and appointments) without filling every hour. Open Schedule, tap the day and time you want, and add the event. That is it.
Why does my home ed schedule look empty?
If you have just opened the schedule for the first time and felt a lurch at the blank screen, you are not alone. After years of school timetables, an empty week can look like evidence that nothing is happening.
It is not. In Montessori home education, a morning left blank in the calendar is not a gap. It is protected time for the work cycle (the roughly two-to-three-hour span in which a child chooses work, concentrates, finishes, and chooses again). The schedule's job is to protect that space, not to fill it.
One or two anchored events per day, a couple of recurring commitments across the week, and open stretches in between is a realistic, healthy homeschool schedule. If yours looks like that, you are doing fine.
How do I set up a homeschool schedule in Willowfolio?
Open Schedule from the main navigation, choose Week or Month view, and tap any blank cell to create your first event.
Week view
You can see the week ahead in a calendar grid, with classes, trips, home sessions and appointments laid out by day and time. Filter by child to see one child's week on its own. Tap any blank cell to create a new event.
Month view
You can step back and see the whole month in one calendar, useful when you are planning around term dates or thinking about the rhythm of the season. Use this for the big picture; use the week view for day-to-day planning.
Adding a recurring event
Inside the schedule event dialog, use the Recurrence picker. You can set an event to repeat weekly, every few weeks, termly or on a custom pattern, so you do not have to enter the same forest school slot every Tuesday. If something comes up one week, you can cancel or edit a single occurrence without affecting the rest of the series.
Cancelling or editing a single occurrence
Tap an event in the calendar. You can cancel one session of a recurring event when something comes up. You can also change the time of just that day without breaking the pattern of the rest. The cancellation shows up softly in your week so you remember why nothing happened.
Classes and cost tracking
Each class has its own page with the cost, the cost model (per session, monthly, termly or by block), the children attending and any notes. You can see at a glance what you are paying for and how often.
This is useful at the start of term when you are weighing up which classes to commit to. It is equally useful mid-term when you are wondering where the money is going. If the cost of a class is not relevant to you, leave the field blank. Nothing breaks.
If money is tight, tracking costs can also help you spot which sessions give the most value. A free forest school that runs every week might be worth more to your family than a paid class that only happens twice a term.
Terms and holidays
You can record your family's term dates and holidays so the schedule knows when your working weeks are. If you write a Local Authority report (called the Council Report inside Willowfolio), these dates feed into the report so it covers your actual term, not the calendar year. Most home-educating families do not follow the school calendar exactly, and the schedule does not expect you to.
What does a real homeschool weekly planner look like?
A sparse schedule with two anchored events and open blocks is typical and healthy. Here is one family's week.
Priya, in Sheffield, has two children: Amir (six) and Noor (three). Their week in the schedule looks like this:
- Monday morning: blank (home session, open work time)
- Tuesday 10:00: Forest school at Ecclesall Woods (recurring, every week, free)
- Wednesday afternoon: blank (library visit or stay home, depending on energy)
- Thursday 10:00: Home-ed group meetup at a local hall (recurring, fortnightly, £2 per family)
- Friday: nothing scheduled
That is five days with two anchored events, one optional outing, and a lot of breathing room. Priya added the forest school as a recurring weekly event and the meetup as fortnightly. Everything else stays open.
On weeks when Noor is unwell or Priya is exhausted, she cancels the Thursday meetup for that single occurrence and the rest of the series stays untouched. The blank Friday is not a failure. It is the day that absorbs the overflow. Sometimes it is just a quiet day at home.
If you are parenting solo or working shifts, your schedule might have fewer anchored events and more flexibility built around your work pattern. That is not a lesser version. A schedule with one recurring commitment and four open days is still a schedule.
If you are still finding your footing, getting started in your first week walks you through the first things to set up in Willowfolio. You can find more guides to every part of the app in the using the app section.