Today we “officially” begin our third year of homeschooling. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since we decided to undertake homeschooling and that this post about what makes a school day was already a year ago. And although we technically school year-round, I consider today our “back to homeschool” day because we are starting a new homeschool routine.
After a horrific summer (which trailed a pretty hard end to the spring) and feelings of failure, inadequacy, frustration and anger, I decided to revamp our entire home life. This includes not only our homeschool routine and schedule but everything.
Here’s the changes I’m making to our homeschool routine to as we head back to homeschool:
Daily subjects
I’ve revamped the girls’ weekly schoolwork requirements many times as well as how I record the information. And it always works for a while and then becomes a frustrating burden for me trying to keep the girls on track as well as tracking their work.
Up to now, we’ve always worked on a weekly required work system where they can do what they want when they want so long as it’s done on Friday. Except more often than not recently, it hasn’t been done on Friday and so the schoolwork trickles into our weekends leaving hubby frustrated that we can’t do anything and me agitated that I’ve failed (again.) So I’ve decided to try switching to daily subjects where we’ll do only math on Monday, language arts on Tuesday, etc. I’m hoping that by focusing their attention they’ll be less fussy about doing the subjects that aren’t their favorite because they know it’s only one day a week.
I’ve left Friday open for “catch-up and fun” so if we miss a day of work because of a field trip, doctor’s appointment or other reason we can catch up that day. If we completed our work for the week then they get to do fun(ner) educational things like going to a museum or the library, doing online learning things (I just discovered BrainPOP!) or maybe even watching an educational movie. I’m hoping this will motivate us to actually get our work done early in the week so we can have our fun day.
Time not amount
I’ve decided to stop requiring a certain amount of work out of the girls for each subject rather than a certain amount. It’s not something I plan to keep long-term but I think it’s an adjustment we need to make for now.
We’re starting with spending an hour on our daily subject. This will not only help me gauge what my girls are capable of completing in a reasonable amount of time but I’m also hoping it will help them develop the self-discipline to sit and work for an extended time without getting distracted or “bored” (a major, major, major struggle for my active little Sugarplum). It’s one hour a day I have to stay on top of them to do their work instead of all week as they refuse to do their work.
Once they can accomplish one hour of work, then we’ll probably switch back to a set amount of work and then they can be done whenever the work is completed rather than having to work for the set amount of time. (Though the one hour may very well be adjusted in the future to better meet their needs and abilities.)
Morning Routine
When we started homeschooling we had a solid morning homeschool routine, things we did after breakfast at the start of each day. Then I got pregnant with Pipsqueak and things slooooooowly fell apart as I laid on the couch all day. Then we moved house and settling in took away from me being able to sit with them. And then Pipsqueak arrived and any kind of homeschool routine flew out the window!
I started relying on the girls a lot to do their work independently and got frustrated trying to work with them on things like spelling when the baby and Doodle were so needy. So we started doing copy work for spelling instead of me reading them the words and with that change, other daily homeschool routines like journaling and calendar.
But with our new schedule, I’m determined to get back onto a morning ritual that will hopefully set us up for the whole day. We’re going to start with family calendar time (to help Doodle with his counting and number recognition and then I plan to read an ABC book with him to help with his alphabet and letter recognition). Then the girls will do 15 minutes of journaling followed by me directing their spelling. This morning the entire process of calendar, journal and spelling only took about 45 minutes which I think is pretty good for a first try!
Siblings as teachers
Another major frustration for me has been keeping track of the work the girls do. It requires me to check over the work they’ve done independently and then record it. It is a very tedious task and because we have been doing school in “chunks,” with the girls completing a bunch of work at one time when I’m angry at them and demand they do something, it’s made my recording work more overwhelming as well because it all happens at once. It also made my record keeping more complicated because I counted everything as single pages.
So with our new daily subject idea, I’ll only have to look over one subject of work and record it each day and I can lump work as series of pages rather than individual ones. I’m also going to enlist the older kids in helping me look over the younger kids’ work. For now, Honeybun will be responsible for correcting Sugarplum’s work while I look over her work and once Doodle comes into the mix, Sugarplum can look over his work. It will give the girls some much-needed review on the easier concepts and me some help!
Housework
Because homeschooling is not just about school, but also family and is centered around the home, I’ve decided to add a cleaning component to our homeschool routine. I’ve broken our house up into 7 zones and assigned each day a zone. Things are always easier broken up into smaller bits and I’m hoping that by concentrating on one piece of the house each day it will relieve us of our binge-cleaning weekends and the nasty feelings we all get about it.
I’m hoping that these small changes to our homeschool routine as we head back to homeschool for another year will make our kids happier, our home cleaner, our schooling less stressful, our days more fun and everyone a lot more enjoyable to be around!
