A few practical homeschooling survival tips
While most of my advice here is academic in nature, I also have a few observations on family life in general that help us survive homeschooling.
I have come to accept that homeschooling is a full-time job, and the more kids you add into the mix, the less time you will have for other things like cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping! It is totally feasible to homeschool one child for kindergarten and first grade for an hour in the afternoons while the younger kids are napping, and you can continue on with morning play groups and the like, without totally changing your lifestyle yet. With more and older kids, though, you have to spend your whole day schooling, and you’re probably not going to be able to do loads of laundry or clean the house. When our house started getting out of hand, my husband and I sat down and instituted Saturday morning cleaning chores. Each of my kids has three tasks, ranging from mowing the lawn and cleaning bathrooms (big kids) to washing windows and vacuuming (little kids). My husband and I oversee things, and by noon on Saturday, the house is as clean as it ever gets. We didn’t need to do this when the kids were younger and I had daily cleaning tasks that I had the time to do myself, but now that my weekdays are as full as my husband’s, the weekend is for cleaning.
Along the same lines, my cooking has become streamlined in this season of life. We love to try new recipes and learn new techniques, but now I mostly save that sort of thing for the weekend and stick with tried-and-true dishes during the week. I use my crockpot multiple times a week, especially for the evenings when we have dance lessons or art class right up until dinner time. Pretty much every single week, we do a whole chicken with carrots and potatoes in the crockpot, then I make broth overnight and do a soup (bacon and bean, chicken noodle, potato, etc) with it the next day. We also have a weekly crockpot beans-and-rice night, either with pinto beans (which I blend with my stick blender to make refried beans) or black beans (which we eat whole over rice and then use the leftovers in chicken tortilla soup or Mexican chicken). Throw in a pasta night (my big kids can cook tortellini and slice up chicken sausage and put together a green salad, so that’s a night I don’t have to do a thing) and our traditional Friday night pizza-and-movie night (by now I can make pizza dough in my sleep, and the kids make up the pizzas), and that’s pretty much our weeknight meals. Predictable, but with some variety in the general categories.
A few years back, my fellow homeschool mom friend, Anna, rocked my world by telling me she has a set menu for breakfasts and lunches. I’d never done that–I mean, I have a variety of options, from oatmeal to cereal to eggs, and I let the kids choose. Choice is good, right? Except it’s not when it literally cripples them, as it does my middle girls, whom I was spending an hour or more each morning cajoling to eat. After Anna’s pep talk, I announced that we’d be instituting a weekly breakfast menu. (We still do sandwiches or leftovers for lunch, but that’s usually not a source of conflict, so I haven’t set up anything official.) The kids whined at first, but after a week or so, my kids all admitted that they liked not having the pressure of deciding what to eat every single morning! Here’s our rough breakfast plan:
Monday–muffins (Mondays are hard, so if I get up early and bake muffins, it sets a positive, fun tone for the week!)
Tuesday–oatmeal (overnight baked if I have time, stovetop if I don’t–two of the kids complain about it, but I still allow fun toppings–mini chocolate chips, coconut flakes, or fruit–so they’re doing better about eating it than I expected)
Wednesday–egg something–scrambled, omelets, over easy with toast, French toast
Thursday–oatmeal again (It’s cheap!)
Friday–bacon or sausage or something a little more fun, like crumpets or sausage gravy and biscuits
Saturday and Sunday–since Daddy’s home and the kids have more time, it depends. The big kids might make pancakes and waffles, or we might do cold cereal, or if we have company, we might do something fancier.
And we have a color code system to organize our kid stuff. We assign a color to each child and make anything in the house that could possibly be a source of stress or confusion fit into the assigned color scheme. It does not have to be their favorite color, because several kids can have the same favorite color. In our school room, this makes it easy to identify whose ruler/history notebook/pair of scissors is whose. I don’t have the time or patience to flight those battles. In the kitchen, we have two of each color of cup and plate and one of each color of bowl. When I am taking drink orders before meals, the color coding helps me keep track of who gets whole milk, who gets 1%, and who wants water. At the end of the meal, I know that my seven year old left her plate on the table because it’s the pink one. We also use assigned colors for water bottles, orbit labels, backpacks, school pencil cases, rulers, and notebooks/folders/church notebooks/commonplace books/Bibles. In the bathroom, we use hair ties around the flosser handle to differentiate, and the kids know to pick their assigned color of toothbrush at the dentist’s office. We color code bath towels (easy to keep track of whose is whose, cutting down on laundry as well as general towel mess after showers), washcloths, swimming towels and cover-ups, and even some dress up clothes. They also have Razor scooters and roller blades in their assigned colors, and of course bike helmets. When we play a board game or get out the math manipulatives, they know not to fight because everyone grabs their assigned color. Their allowance binders are color coded. The Grandmas keep assigned colors in mind at Christmas time, too, so even some of their homemade or consumable stuff ends up being in their assigned colors.
