Your first week
Day one, you set your homeschool up and your kid opens a lesson — about fifteen minutes of reading, a primary source, and then the work the lesson sets. In some courses that is twenty minutes in the notebook. In others it is argued out at the table.
By midweek every course is moving a lesson a day and the planner is keeping pace — folding whatever life knocked loose forward instead of letting it pile up. And on Friday, in the one course you have made the formation course for the term, the month’s question gets posed: one paragraph, first instinct, undefended.
That question is the first rung, and it is the whole pitch. Over the next three Fridays your student gathers the evidence, drafts it, and argues the other side — and at the end of the month they stand up and make the case out loud.