Can You Throw Your Homeschool Plans Out the Window?
There are endless things to take care of in your home, are you caught up on your laundry, have you planned your meals for the week, completed your grocery shopping, planned your homeschool week out, not to mention ensure that everyone is fed, cleaned up and safe on a daily basis.
If you want to ensure that your home and homeschool run seamlessly we get organized. There are plans and lists and schedules for our personal life, extra curricular activities, doctor’s appointments and then there’s the schedules and lesson plans for our homeschool, book lists, and schedules that we have to maintain as well.
To ensure that everything is running smoothly you likely have a daily and weekly to do list, a grocery list, a menu plan, the list and to do tasks can become overwhelming. I sometimes feel like I can’t measure up to those with their colorful planners and neat menu plans with their $100 grocery list that they stick to as they shop.
I make plans just like everybody else, and I take a long time looking it over making sure it’s doable and ensuring that it works for our family as well.
When it comes to homeschool planning, I research curricula like no tomorrow. I have an Excel sheet with prices from my favorite vendors and then I see if I can buy it used factoring the cost of shipping as well. I have things down to a science.
I also take my time to ensure that each of my children’s day is planned out perfectly ensuring that I’ve alternated writing intensive subjects with those that are not.
Everything is planned out perfectly…at least it is in my head.
In reality, that is far from reality. Your child hates the math program you’ve chosen and breaks out in tears every time you bring it out. You child complains every time they have to write a sentence that is longer than 5 words. Your child can’t stand the history book that you’ve thoughtfully picked out.
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Can you through your plans out the window?
Can you take a breather and break out something new? Can you throw away the money you’ve spent on your brand new shiny curriculum and change your curriculum to suit your child? Can you you throw out that brand spanking new plan that you’ve spent the summer working on?
Can you put your child’s needs above your grand plans?
You really need to decide what is working for your child and what isn’t. Sometimes it’s not the curriculum but how the material is represented. Maybe they need to take in the lessons in another way. They can’t listen to you read aloud but would love to read it themselves or an audiobook while they are coloring.
If you can’t tweak your curriculum, than you may have to sell it to make room for something new. It’s a fact that no matter how much research, thought and planning that goes into your perfect homeschool lesson plans, they may not be perfect.
Just throw it away, take out a unit study or lapbook and ask them what they’d like to study. You may be surprised with their decision.
There’s no use forcing something unto your child, if it doesn’t work, you got to change things up.
Absolutely! We’ve tossed plans out the window and adapted to changing needs several times. At times it was a horrible decision, usually because there wasn’t a real need for change.
Other times we were at the end of our ropes and children were in tears. We made drastic changes. The changes were long lasting and successful and some of the best decisions we’ve made in our homeschool over the years.
Thank you for the reminder that there is also the moment when reality meets best-laid plans. Sometimes the two meld successfully. Other times it’s a disaster. 🙂