CHM110:Ways to Manage Time In Your Homeschool

Hi, I'm Demetria, and you're listening to the Christian Homeschool Moms Podcast.

So thank you so much for listening in today.

I'm excited to offer information on a monthly basis, sometimes every other week, sometimes once a month.

But I like to offer you info on how to run your homeschool in a way that's conducive for you and your family, that brings you peace, brings you joy.

And my tagline has always been helping moms to homeschool with joy.

And one of the ways I find that I can help you is to offer this podcast as well as my YouTube channel, which you can find over at mom zest on YouTube.

And I just pretty much offer my life and my experiences and everything that I've been through to hopefully encourage those of you who are also on the homeschool journey.

And I think that's what it's all about, really, is encouraging one another, supporting each other, and just being a help.

So my goal at Christian Homeschool Moms is to encourage moms of faith to keep at it, to keep at this thing called the Homeschool Journey.

And if this is what you've been called to do, then this is what God is giving you and equipping you with the energy, the reserves, everything that you need, need to be able to follow through with the vision of homeschooling your kids, you know, and if you're going through a season when it's just not the right time to homeschool, that's okay, too.

And for you to understand that there is no condemnation and that we shouldn't pigeonhole ourselves and put ourselves in a box, that this life is what we've been called to for today.

But if God moves you on to something different, then that's great, too.

And so that's one of the things that I want to always encourage on this podcast, is to give ourselves for us, to give ourselves the freedom to move with what the Lord is putting on your heart.

So I call that moving with the spirit.

So whatever the Spirit is telling you, whatever the Holy Spirit is leading you to do at that time and season of your life, to roll with that.

So sometimes that might mean, you know, putting an end to something that you've been doing for such a long time.

And if homeschooling needs to come to an end for your family, then so be it.

And God will bless you in your next stage of your life, in the next phase.

And so I always like to kind of put that out there.

I don't do it often enough.

But when I do remember, I like to throw that out there just so that those of you listening can understand where I'm coming from as the host of a Christian homeschool mom podcast, that it's that this is not about keeping everybody in this phase of we have to homeschool because this is God's will.

That is not, not at all what my, my vision and my focus is here on the podcast.

My focus is to encourage you while you're on this journey and if, when the day and the season comes that you're no longer doing this because either your kids are grown up or you've decided to move on to another form of education for your kids, that you've at least felt encouragement and support along the way while you were on this path.

So that is my heart for you when you listen in to these episodes.

So today I want to get into some ideas of what it means to manage the busyness in your homeschool and how to do that without going insane.

Okay.

So it's so easy for homeschool moms to feel overwhelmed with being busy.

And I do oftentimes talk about cutting out the busyness and simplifying the process for our families.

But sometimes that's just.

Just not enough.

Sometimes we really do have to embrace where we are.

And if busy is where we are, then there are ways to manage that busy life until we're in our next stage of life.

So this is where I'm coming from on today's podcast.

I want to direct you also to a couple of older podcasts that if this, if it's your first time listening in, that you'll see what we actually talk about here.

And I've talked about finding peace in your homeschool when we interviewed Julie Bogart, a brave writer, a couple of episodes back, and we talked about planning and unplanning your homeschool goals.

What does it mean to do both to plan and unplanned?

That's.

That was an interesting juxtaposition.

And so we talked about that last episode was homeschooling for free.

And so there are a couple of interviews if you go further back in archives.

So I invite you to do that.

Christianhomeschoolmoms.com podcast2 so that is the official URL.

And I will leave a link to that in the show notes as well.

Okay, so here are some tips that have actually helped me to manage a busy homeschool lifestyle.

And for those of you who are not familiar with me, my children are ages 10 and 15.

I have two daughters and my oldest, especially as she's now in her high school years, is keeping me quite busy with transporting her around the city and getting her to and from all of her events.

She's not particularly over scheduled.

We do try to spend a good bit amount of time at home when we can, but last year we had a really, really crazy season of just always being gone, gone, gone.

And it was overwhelming to me.

Now we're not in that same space this year, so that's good.

This year it's, it's been a little bit less hectic and I've been able to take a breather and we have spent more time at home.

But again, last year was one of those times in our lives when the kids wanted to try basketball at the ymca.

They wanted to be involved in our church choir and then another church where they're involved with youth group.

My oldest daughter also wanted to be on the worship team there and so we obliged that because we understand that her one of, one of her goals and also talents and gifts that we believe in, you know, encouraging our kids to, to really dig deep into themselves and figure out what God has placed in their lives.

And we can obviously see one of them is music.

So we didn't want to say no to those things that she was requesting and so we made the sacrifices as a family to get her to these, to her practices.

And like I said, there are two different churches so we were at practice at both and it took up a little time during the week to the least.

And then we also allowed them to do basketball at the ymca.

We also had a homeschool co op that we were part of and she was also part of the homeschool choir there.

So that's three different singing groups and you know, in addition to that we had occasional field trips and just some things going on, you know, just a lot of stuff happening, lots of events happening, you know, whether it's at the, the, the homeschool group or the enrichment classes at the church or just in the community.

We were volunteering a lot, you know, as a family.

So we were out doing those things.

And we also have a family Bible study that we support our church with as a small group.

And not to mention that I was involved in a small group for women.

So we had a lot going on plus running a, a home based business, a website design business and wanting to encourage our children to go down the route of entrepreneurship as well.

So teaching them the ropes of how to begin their own business.

So we've all got YouTube channels and we've all got, you know, things going on that keep us busy online.

So we're pretty much digital nerds here.

We digital nomads, digital nerds, whatever you want to call us.

But we, we stay online a lot and we stay, we've been staying out of the house a lot last year, so very, very, very, very busy.

How did we manage that and how did I not go insane?

So the first thing that I would encourage you to do is that you should admit your time catastrophes and face them.

We've all, many of us who have over scheduled at some point have faced the fact that we have created what I like to call a time catastrophe because sometimes there are so many things that we want to do and we just can't do them all at once.

And when we try to, we are actually over scheduling.

And that is what I went through last year.

So many of us do go through these seasons, especially as our kids become older and there just seems to be no time to do anything except chauffeur our kids and support them with transportation needs.

But during these seasons, it's important that we face our time catastrophes and realize that there are seasons to say no and yes.

And so we'll get to that in a moment.

But realize that the time conflict is there.

It's staring us in the face and we have to deal with it.

So admit that we're having an issue and a conflict and now figure out what we're going to do next so that our busy homeschool does not drive us nuts.

My next piece of advice for you is to use a planning system like it's your best friend.

You know, I especially love Google Calendar, but I also love my handy dandy notebooks.

Notebooks are my best friend and it's where I write down all my goals for the day and what I plan to do.

So writing down my goals gives me the motivation to check back and see what and how much I've actually accomplished.

And so what I do if sometimes it's helpful for me to just like rip out a sheet of paper and just jot down my goals and tack it up on a wall or place it somewhere visible.

Other times I keep it in the notebook and take it with me as I'm out and about so I can just keep track of something visual.

So what I do is I tend to write out my kids homeschool goals for the day so that I can keep track of where we are education wise.

And I also write about my business goals so that I can weave those into what I'm doing throughout the day as well.

So I have business and homeschooling and then I kind of add on those household goals that I have for my home and errands to run.

I factor that in and also my personal goals if I plan to work out that day and what I plan to eat.

Right now I'm starting a 21 day detox.

So I like to add in these types of things so that I can get a kind of a big overall picture of what my day looks like visually.

Since I am very, very visual, I like to see what that looks like on the whole as I look at my, my planner or my paper and I'm more likely to accomplish those goals.

I also love Google Calendar just because, you know, adding in those long term goals are important and they pop up in my calendar and remind me in my email when there's something that has to to happen that day.

If I have a library book due or if there's an event that we have to go to that we planned that will be on my Google Calendar.

So I'll factor that into my daily plans.

But sometimes when I don't get around to adding everything that I want into my Google Calendar, just having a sheet of paper with all my goals written out, fresh, freshly written the morning of or the night before helps me tremendously.

So I do use that type of planning system.

I'm not a hardcore planning out every single thing that we do in our homeschool.

If you go back and listen to previous episodes, you'll realize that I am not about that.

That's not what I do.

I have a really hard time with schedules, but having a planning system as far as for me, very, a very loose system.

But that allows me some type of, it allows me flexibility, but it's not rigid.

But it also gives me some form of boundaries about what I actually, what I absolutely need to accomplish that day is quite helpful for me.

So my next, my next tip for you is to be intentional and to set realistic goals.

Now my goals have to be realistic and we have to, we have to be realistic.

We're moms who are super busy and we're homeschooling.

Okay?

That's just taking a huge chunk of our energy.

So let's be realist, realistic about what we actually can accomplish.

So if I plan to truly accomplish my goals, I realize I can't do it all.

And that progress in each aspect of my life takes time and it takes daily commitment.

Small chunks of daily commitment.

So I like the phrase slow and steady wins the race.

And if I just give a little attention every day to helping my daughter with grammar, math, and a science project, or just, just a little attention every day, she becomes better.

Slowly over time, I found that having these huge intensive clinical type experiences, experiences where we're just pouring all of our energy into getting up to.

Up to par with math or focusing all of our energy on hours and hours of just like writing intensives, and that those kinds of things don't work in our family.

We need small chunks of time every day to create daily habits that amount to success in those subject areas.

So we don't do a lot of intensive things unless my kids are super interested and they want to see, spend two hours building and creating or designing or writing and or art.

So those are things that they're interested in.

And they can spend hours doing those types of things, but we don't spend hours and hours on math, hours in English, you know, those kinds of things.

It takes a little bit at a time every day.

So if I just give a little attention every day to helping my daughter with these things, she will get better.

If I give myself small incremental goals for making progress with learning a new skill, which is something that I think every entrepreneur should do.

So that's what I do for my business.

And working for one client at a time, not being overwhelmed with the thought that I have five clients to get to.

I just take the one client and I give a few minutes of time to that one client, and then I put that away and move on to the next.

Or cleaning only one room in the house for the week, for example, and not focusing on the whole house, you know, doing laundry a little bit every day, not being overwhelmed with five loads of laundry, doing one load a day, two loads a day, reading one chapter of a book, you know, maybe a week, even if that's all I can fit in, that's what I do.

And I find that making progress in that way makes me feel successful because I'm still able to accomplish my goals just not in, you know, really fast way.

I'm not quick with it.

It takes time for me because I'm doing so much, I have to do less of each thing at a time.

And that's okay with me.

So this is where I learned the beauty of setting goals that I can realistically accomplish.

And this keeps me from being overwhelmed.

So hopefully that will help you as well.

And the next thing is to be sure to delegate, you know, there's so much to accomplish at home and abroad, so I've learned to delegate.

My daughters are both old enough.

They're 10 and 15, so they're old enough to do a good portion of their, the housework for me so they can both cook and clean after themselves.

They can make their own beds and clean their own rooms.

They do their own laundry.

And I just focus on housekeeping, which excludes their bedrooms and their shared bathroom.

They're responsible for those things.

I've also learned the beauty of delegating lesson planning for my high schooler who is in the 10th grade, and she can now take charge of her education and figure out her own path to success.

So I've learned, and I'm still learning as I'm in the throes of homeschooling a high schooler, that rather than driving myself bananas figuring out how to chart her path through high school and college, I mean, I've gone through all of this over and over again since she entered ninth grade and even before that, slightly eighth grade, I started thinking about these things really heavily and became so overwhelmed we ended up enrolling her in online virtual schools.

And we withdrew her from those schools shortly after.

We realized they weren't accomplishing anything for our family and were not a good choice for her.

And so now that we're back to our traditional homeschooling with her, we've been really just figuring out how to chart her path through, from now through graduation.

And I realized that that is another load on a parent's mind.

When you're homeschooling a high schooler, you can really feel overwhelmed just with the information overload and what to do, where to start, who to go to, who needs to be your advisor to help you through this, because it is so, so much, especially if you have a student who is college oriented and definitely wants to end up in a college of some sort.

So I find that, you know, I can gather the information for my knowledge only, you know, and not worry about, you know, what she's going to think at the moment, just, just for me to understand how it works and then talk with my husband and share this information afterward with my daughter.

And that by knowing the facts about what to expect in high school and then just kind of throwing the ball into her court to see if she will take some lead in charting her path through the rest of 10th grade, it's been helpful for me not to feel overwhelmed because I realized that I'm not driving her to be successful.

She's driving herself And I love that intrinsic motivation.

And I think it's absolutely needed when kids are in high school, because if they want to go to college and if they want to end up at the end result, then it's their, I believe, their responsibility to take on a lot of that pressure or responsibility to figure out how to get there and to use parents to help navigate them through that.

But they have to want it.

So I.

In my opinion, one of the things I've decided not to do is to push her to go to any particular school or to push her to go to college or to push her to become an entrepreneur.

As much as I would love for her to, because that's what I do and that's what I did.

I want her to say for herself, this is what she wants.

And if she doesn't want that, I want to be able to support her decision regarding what she does after high school graduation.

So I am learning to kind of step back a little bit and give her the reins over this and allow her father and I to be her advisors and to help guide her through to her end result.

So that means that she will need to say, I know that I need to take this test, and it's coming up in October, because we've given her that information.

And then she can say, well, if I need to take the sats and if I need to take this, and I need to be studying for that from between now and over the summer so that I'm prepared.

And so that's what we're doing, is delegating some of the responsibility for her education over to her.

I'm delegating a lot of the household duties and chores over to my children so that I don't get overwhelmed.

Next is don't be afraid to say yes or no.

Okay.

Sometimes we'll just have to say no.

We have to say no to too many events.

We have to say no to yet another volunteer opportunity, no to this curriculum that's no longer working for our family.

There's so many times that I have blogged about things that just did not work as much as I've blocked about things that do.

So you can go back and see any of my prior blog review, any reviews I've done on curriculum, I always come back and say, hey, this did or didn't work.

Or at least try to on a regular basis.

Sometimes we'll have to say no to another park day because we're gone far too often and we can't afford to be out of the house another day of the week.

But there are also other times when we just need to be able to say yes.

Yes to a volunteer opportunity, because maybe this is a chance of a lifetime for our family to do this great work for our community and to be together as a family doing it.

So, yes, or maybe yes to a new curriculum that will bless our kids or make our homeschooling lives easier.

Even if it's not the most popular curriculum on the market or even if nobody seems to be using it and you're not seeing any reviews on it on YouTube, you know, you know that it will work for your family.

And so yes to that curriculum, though it's not shiny and glossy and though it's not popular, but it will work for your family.

Yes to that or yes to a park day, because your family needs that time out of the house, as opposed to a family who's burned out and needs to be at home more often.

Maybe you need to get out more.

So, yes to that.

So know when to say yes or no, and don't be afraid to use your freedom of the yes and freedom of the no.

And lastly, I just want to say simplify where you can.

Okay.

There are a couple of ways to simplify your life.

The first thing is, you know, just thinking about what it means to homeschool younger children.

And when I say younger, I mean anywhere from upper elementary and lower.

I believe that the three Rs are the basics.

If you can give them reading, writing, and arithmetic.

According to Ruth Bechic, those three subject areas are ones that you should probably focus on.

Because if your child knows how to read, how to write, and how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, then they have a good foundation for their middle school and high school years.

And basically that's what they need for life.

They need to be able to read, write, and do math.

So simplifying your homeschool around that content, if you don't have time for science every week or social studies, history, geography, every week, that's okay.

And then if you're a spiritual family and.

And because this is a Christian podcast, I always like to mention that, you know, of course, teaching our kids God's word, reading them the Bible, talking about the word of God, talking about the Lord and his ways and character development, those things are super important.

So those three Rs, and then, of course, adding on to that, your faith and passing that on to your children, I think are the most basic ingredients that you can have on an everyday, you know, everyday basis with your homeschooling.

And if you simplify to that, you're okay because history and science and those are great subjects.

We don't want to neglect them.

And.

But I do believe that sometimes we can get overwhelmed with making sure that our kids learn the trajectory of history from, you know, the, from ancient times into modern, postmodern times, everything from, from ancient Egypt to the Civil War.

And it's just so much, so many times it can be overwhelming to our kids and it can be too much for us to handle if somebody, especially if we're not history buffs or if we for the first time, are homeschooling.

And now we're feeling the pressure to go through history chronologically with our children for whatever reason.

So sometimes that doesn't work for everyone to teach in that manner.

Maybe history doesn't get.

Maybe history is something that we get to on occasion.

Now, I'll have to throw a little plug here for some of the history curriculum that we've enjoyed over the years.

And I guess I won't name them specifically, but you can visit my blog and you'll see a lot of the things that we've tried.

And I love history.

I enjoy it, and I love learning it with my children and teaching them as I learn, because I don't know it all.

And I because I don't know.

There's a lot about history I don't know.

And it's so lovely to be able to learn these things with them.

And because we're an African American family, it's awesome to be able to see how blacks in America have contributed so much to the history of the United States.

And so we've been adding that into our American history curriculum.

And we've had so many different ways to view history and how to plug in educational experiences with learning history.

But we don't always use a packaged curriculum for history.

We pick up books from the library.

We love Usborne.

We love books that really help us to interact with history.

And we love museums and visiting.

Whenever we go to Alabama, we like to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and just like to see different aspects of.

Of history.

So again, simplify where you can also Letting go of cleaning overkill.

Do you have overkill with cleaning?

Are you always constantly on the move, wiping something down, sweeping something?

Just constantly feeling like you have to keep the floors shiny and spotless?

I am that woman that always wants to keep everything nice and neat.

But I have learned that in order to accomplish my goals in life, I can't spend all day doing that.

And it's just not conducive for our family.

And we have to set aside time when we're doing these things.

So I find that the main important things for me is laundry.

Getting that out of the way so we don't have piles of laundry.

Keeping that folded and put away, keeping the floors vacuumed and the countertops cleared makes me feel good.

And I also sweep.

I do sweep after every meal, so that's another thing.

I just like to keep the floors clean, but I don't spend a lot of time scrubbing and mopping.

We have hardwood floors downstairs, so they're, you know, kind of a task to keep clean.

But I don't spend a whole lot of time like I used to when we first moved into our home.

I'm finding that keeping things vacuumed and folded and put away, countertops wiped down, floors swept and keeping things where they belong.

And when they get out of order, having the kids go back and put them back in order is really, really helpful for our families so that we keep things rolling.

But I'm not constantly in deep clean mode.

And then I set aside days when I do deep cleaning for every room in the house, one room at a time, not all on the same day, because that would be overwhelming.

So there are days that I have a bathroom day where I clean deep clean the bathrooms.

And there may be a day that I will make sure all the bedding and the sheets are properly cared for and the bedrooms look good.

So that's not every day.

And I've learned that adding that into my life every single day with deep cleaning is especially overwhelming.

So I just don't do that every day.

But I think that when you find the areas in your life that are helpful for you to focus on, then you do that.

And you will find that when you let go of some things, you know, just the things that aren't quite as important in order of importance, and you know, what's important to you and what you need to keep clean and what you need to deep clean and how often you should do that, and that is your choice, and that's personal to you and your family and how you like your home to be and how you like to live in your home.

But when you simplify those things, it helps give you more time to focus on the things that you value.

And then lastly, planning easy meals.

So simplification.

When it comes to meal planning for our family, we like the same types of meals on a regular basis.

So I'm constantly recycling and upcycling meals.

And if we have leftovers.

I just, you know, create something brand new out of it.

Maybe a casserole dish out of some spaghetti dish we had the night before.

I like to recycle meals like that.

And then, you know, lots of crock pot meals going on, especially in the wintertime.

And it's just easy to throw everything in a crock pot and the next day you have soup, you know, and it's just marvelous to be able to leave the house and have your meal ready for you when you get home.

On the days we don't do crock pots, it's easy for me to throw a pot, throw in a pot of chili and rice.

Our rice cooker, our rice cooker is always on go.

So we'll have a 15 minute rice complete and then we'll throw in our tomatoes and ground turkey and bell pepper, onion and garlic, and then a little bit of chili seasoning mix to create chili beans to create our chili.

And we just bring that to a boil.

And once we've got all that together, it takes no more than about, let's say about 20 minutes on the chili end and 15 minutes on the rice end and we've got a full complete meal.

And sometimes we'll add a little salad on the side with that.

You know, there are meals that don't take that long.

30 minute meals.

When I was watching Rachael Ray years ago with that show 30 Minute Meals, it really inspired me to start to learn how to do really quick meals for my family so that I'm not spending a lot of time in the kitchen.

So that that has been something we've learned to do as shortcuts in our family.

I also teach my daughters how to do some of these meals so that they can take over some of the cooking on days when I just can't get around to it.

So my oldest daughter does know how to go in the kitchen and make her family spaghetti and meatballs.

There are certain recipes that she is good at and definitely she's a baker, so she's really wonderful with desserts.

We love her her breads.

So she can do a nice challah bread.

She can do some chocolate chip cookies or sugar cookies.

So she's, she's our baker of the family and we enjoy eating her desserts.

So when you pass on your skills to your children, you'll find that's another way you can save some time and energy.

So that is all I have for you today.

That was a lot, but I just wanted to really make sure that I give you as much info as possible with helping you to manage your busy homeschool life without going crazy.

Without going insane.

So I hope you enjoyed that and let me know if you have any questions.

Questions I would love to hear from you.

Just simply hit the contact link on ChristianHomeschoolMoms.com if you'd like to speak with me and I'll have more information to come soon about things I'm doing on the side as a mompreneur and how I can help you with website design and also just helping with time management for mompreneurs.

I have a lot of info just for moms in business@mompreneursandheels.com so I invite you to visit me there.

Link is in the show notes as well.

Thank you so much for listening and you have a blessed, blessed week and happy homeschooling.