Homeschooling throughout the obstacles

There are so many distractions that can get in the way of homeschooling your kids. Homeschooling needs to be your number one priority and everything else should be secondary. I find if I don’t prioritize homeschooling each day then everything else takes the place of it.

Yes there will be emergencies or unforeseen circumstances. Some things are beyond our control. I find what helps us is setting our weekly planner. I have created my own planners which I found best suites our lifestyle. It has each subject listed as well as each day of the week. Every Friday I set out our weekly plan for the week ahead. I find this helps us keep on track with where we are in our term and our year. If we don’t complete anything on our weekly planner I simply move it over to the next week. The planner is just a guide I adjust it if needed.

I number each week so I know exactly how many weeks of school we’ve completed and I can use that as a marker to see how many more weeks we have left for the term and year end. We work a total of 38 weeks of the year. We school year-round which means we take off school when we need to. We work six to eight weeks and then take a week off if we need to. If we don’t need to take a break we continue with school.

In January my eldest son left for university so I knew we would start school early in January so that we could take a few days off to drive him to university. We then took a week off in March. There has been so many long weekends and public holidays that tend to disrupt our school rhythm but I know if I plan our week out beforehand we can more or less stay on track.

If we have a dentist or doctor appointment that isn’t too urgent I try to schedule it for after lunch so we can get some school work done in the morning. Our mornings normally start between 8am and 8.30am. We can complete at least four lessons by lunchtime so if we need to leave the house most of our day is complete. My daughter can do her Good and the Beautiful timetable songs while we drive and reading is also done in the car.

There are sometimes unforeseen circumstances like if I am sick or one of my kids are sick we then do light educational work like reading and watch educational youtube videos on science history that we are studying for that week. There are so many fun science channels we found recently. Some are The Amoeba Sisters for high school we found this so useful. Another one is Crash Course Kids. For History we watch Forgotten History and Horrible Histories. We started reading a missionary books last year called Christian Heroes: Then and now. We also bake or do some art and craft on our sick days.

If we sometimes complete some books earlier in our year I print fun worksheets for maths or the languages. Or we subscribe to online channels like Night Zookeeper for online English fun. Night Zookeeper allows kids to be creative with writing skills as well as learning grammar in a fun interactive way.  If we don’t complete some work on time we take into the first month of our new year.
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I find a little planning and structure go a long way in homeschooling my kids. Adding something fun like baking or painting on the slow days allows me and them to learn while enjoying our time together. I always aim to foster a love for reading and learning in my kids.
 
www.nightzookeeper.com
 https://www.amoebasisters.com/our-videos
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