When I first started homeschooling, I loved to make ambitious plans with colour-coded timetables. I would spend many hours researching curriculum and creating my own, printing and collating pages for my little learners. I felt so organised and ready to ‘bring it on!’
However, by the end of the first week, I felt so far behind 'schedule', drowning in housewok, exhausted by the many demands of my children and ready to throw in the towel. What had gone wrong? How did my epic plan fail? Can anyone relate to this? (Please don’t get me wrong, there is a place for timetables and planning. They are part of faithfully preparing your family learning, as long as they are there to help you, and not master you.)
Over the years, I have learned, and am still learning to take things slow, enjoy the moment and plan less! Of course, there is no ‘foolproof’ way of homeschooling (or parenting for that matter) where everything goes to plan and each day is perfect.
The biggest difference I have found is to ease our family into our learning.
After a break – whether it’s short or longer, it has made a big difference in our home to take things slowly.
Easing in is taking one thing at a time to add into our day.
First, we always start in establishing good habits. If you’ve missed my thoughts on this, you can read them HERE. Once I feel that we’ve established some habits around the house, I think about adding something else in.
In your homeschool, you may have a variety of elements to your family learning. It may be one-on-one lessons, reading time together, independent work, nature journaling or exercise etc. The beauty of homeschooling is that there are endless elements that you can choose to engage with in your family learning.
Easing in means to choose one, just one (it’s so tempting to start with the lot!) element that you have planned, or are really excited about and begin incorporating that into your day.
Once you all are comfortable with the way the new element is flowing in your family groove, then you can choose another element to add in. For us, I find that after three or four days, my children are ready for another element. Although some elements need more time or less time. After a couple of weeks we are in full flight and finding our family learning groove.
Next time you’re about to launch in to your new school plan, try to start slow by easing in. It’s my hope that your family will adjust slowly to find a peaceful family groove.
Penny
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