School Routines

In my homeschooling, homekeeping dream of dreams,…I’ve got it all together.

Yeah- I don’t. I have it just enough together to keep it going. Sometimes a little better than that. I’ll give myself a little credit. But really I have two problems – I need self-discipline and I’m lazy. (Those are two separate problems right – or are they the same one? Doesn’t matter. Moving on.)

Most days (though not all, because of the aforementioned two problems), we get up around 8, we eat, dress, and do some morning chores. Before lunch we’ll get started on school work. We’ll work on school for a few hours while Little Prince naps for most of it, breaking for lunch and wrapping up with snack time at 3:00. Snack time is the one thing that we do every single day on time without fail. We have issues.

In the past our school day has changed so much to fit our current needs — which is good because that’s one of the benefits of homeschooling, doing school during the baby’s naptime for example. It can be hard (it might be easier if the schedule didn’t change from year to year) but with littles I focus more on regular routines and less on strict schedules.

This year, though,… this year we’re headed for a more strict routine. This year, we have to. This year, we can. Princess’ will have to spend more time on her school work. Little Prince doesn’t take naps anymore. Drama Queen will be doing more school work. This year, we can start earlier in the day because we won’t be waiting until nap time. This year, we’ll have to or we’ll be working on school through suppertime.

There are changes in the wind.

God has been working on me a lot over the last few years and little by little (and I minuscule piece by minuscule piece – I’m apparently very slow to change and set in my ways) God has been training me in self-discipline. I feel like I should be much farther along than I am by now. Still, I am farther along than I was a few years ago. There is progress. Lately I’ve been really convicted so I’m cranking up the effort dial.

So here’s my planned routine for this year.

• This year, I HAVE to be up by seven (I was actually doing this for a while, I just need to get back into the habit. Six-thirty would be even better.)
• This year, I HAVE to get the kids up BEFORE 8, between 7:30 and 7:45, dressed and beds made and ready to eat at 8am.
• This year, we HAVE to start school at 8:30. Every single morning.
• We will break for lunch at 11:30, we’ll have a snack at 3pm. (It always helps to have something on the list you KNOW you can do.)
• This year, we’ll be doing a modified workbox system with all three kids. Every evening I HAVE to prepare for the next day. We’ll spend however long it takes to get it done.
• We also need to make sure that we get a certain amount of picking up done at night so in the morning we have a clean eating and working space to get a good start on our day without delays.

That’s about as strict as I’m making it. There are plenty of new HAVE TO’s in there already. Perhaps next year we can refine it a little more. In the meantime, getting this done will be hard work, but well worth it!

This post happily submitted to Week 4 of the NOT Back to School Bloghop at My 3 Boybarians.