What Made a Mess & What We Changed Up

Happy New Homeschool Year to us! And to you as well if you also homeschool year-round.

We start our new homeschool year next week. Naturally this has meant a time of reflection for me as the current leader of our homeschool planning and achievement. I have been preparing our pockets, shelves, and backpacks over the last couple weeks and this has given me plenty of opportunity to run through what worked in the last academic year—and what I might want to change.

Thought it could be fun to go through this with you, maybe we can workshop some ideas together?

Lesson #1: Unit Studies

Unit studies worked when I prepped them. And when I didn’t have one specific topic I felt super lost and defeated. When we want to really dive into a topic, we do it big! It takes us weeks and weeks, we get in depth about the most random little segments, and the three of us thoroughly enjoy it. For the most part, when we have a set unit study, everybody works well with it.

The problem that was arising was that there were times when we didn’t have one specified topic to loop all of our lessons around. When it was time for me to prep a new lesson plan for the week, I felt a little misplaced when I didn’t have a central subject of discussion. It inspired my vocabulary words and math manipulatives and reading passages. Without this I felt a tad stuck. This year we actually don’t have any unit studies planned. This will actually be my first year without them but I am feeling more confident than usual so I’m going to roll with it. To read about how we built a curriculum from scratch this year, just click here, I ended up laying out a full post about it.

Lesson #2: Socialization

I cannot believe I am actually going to publish this in a post, but we socialized entirely too much last school year. At a certain point we were out and hanging with other folks every day of the school week. I love the flexibility that homeschool provides but I also feel some level of guilt about socializing my kids enough. I still don’t know who’s voice THAT is in my head, but regardless, it’s in there. With two dance classes, two exercise classes (plus one for me), and two co-ops, we were “outside” far too often last year.

At first, I thought it was just me feeling overwhelmed and like we were smooshing in formal education in the cracks between social time. I am a bit of a homebody and need to reset in my own space. My son’s social battery usually runs out around the same time as mine. My daughter, the social butterfly of the house, could charge her batteries off of a chat with a stranger she met at the post office. We three sat down and came up with an outings schedule that worked for all of us. Around the same time, my husband and I discussed some general plans for our week—like being more intentional about when we schedule full day outings or trying not to schedule them back-to-back. Eventually we took it a step further and cut down each kid to one class per week. They’ve still got clubs and a several monthly groups and activities that aren’t going anywhere—don’t you worry.

Lesson #3: Sticky Notes

Unclear when but at a certain point in the year, I just sort of stopped keeping organized notes. At the start of the school year I had a designated planner for homeschool scheduling and notes—stopped using that entirely. I was printing off a weekly schedule every Sunday to use as a sort of checklist (which also got ditched towards the end of third quarter of our school year) that I would scratch any quick notes on. All of my notes started to get scrawled all over the place, mostly on sticky notes. Eventually I started scribbling things down in GoodNotes (on my iPad) to at least feel like I had one central location for my notes and future lesson ideas.

Part of why I was having trouble taking notes is that I used to only do this at my desk, which was in our bedroom. I felt like I was away from the kids and writing away—which was taking time from observing them and just being more present in general. The iPad did help in letting me take my notes there and get my thoughts and ideas out. So for this year, I prepared a few templates for myself. I kept them pretty plain so that I could just pop one in, and add whatever titles I need that day. The hope is if I make a habit of note-taking and planning in GoodNotes every week, and continuing my general planning in Notion, I can feel a little bit more put together. More about that here.

Lesson #4: Floors & Ceilings

One thing that did work was having a floor and a ceiling for the day. On the floor, meaning if nothing else got done that day, we at least:

• Read for twenty minutes
• Free wrote or copied down three sentences
• Completed a story math problem

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were touched on each and every day. Rain or shine, sick or snarky. Taking things in stride this way when one or more of us just couldn’t pull off any more gave us a low goal to reach for.

Hitting the ceiling, believe it or not, did actually happen fairly often. These were those wonderful days when we finished everything on our lesson plan, spent a nice time outside, ate well, successfully completed a project without a huge mess, laughed together, and a cute little birdy greeted us hello. These wonderful days I tried to milk as long as I could. Each kid would pick out a fancy sticker or we’d bake a small batch of cookies and cozy up to a book at the end of the night. These are the days that remind you why you work so hard to homeschool—so we don’t breeze by them.

Lesson #5: Dailies

Daily exercises worked all the way across the board. Reading daily, writing daily, basic math facts daily, even going out on our bikes or tossing a ball lately built up an incredible amount of muscle memory and allowed both my kids to develop so quickly over short spans of time. I lose interest in some things in weird ways so to maintain my stamina I usually switched up our daily challenge every other week or so.

Lesson #6: Sharing

Sharing a caddy full of pencils, crayons, markers, and colored pencils worked at the start of the year. we had a third kiddo with us each day at that time. Two new 3-year olds felt like it required structure and it worked! After he left us and my two kids got the hang of being seated and gathering all their supplies before they started, they eventually started developing their own little work styles. One would want to sit at a table, the other wanted to work on the floor. In the afternoons Bug would want to sit in the yard and Chunk at the dining table. I started having to grab a small tray for one child to hold their supplies each time, so this year they each got their own little caddies, index card boxes, and pencil boxes. I gave them to them for our Back to School Party and they have loved having their own little supplies to be responsible for.

Lesson #7: Regulated Reading

I kind of briefly mentioned this one above but reading deserves it’s own special shout out (I think). A regular reading routine has been an awesome part of our homeschool routine that all three of us are benefiting from. I love it because it’s encouraged my daughter to try reading more on her own—independently and aloud to her family. My son loves being read to at this age and stage so he hardly ever turns down any read-aloud time. And Bug has benefited in that it helped her pick up on our reading lessons a lot. She enjoys the challenge of reading any and everything around her right now. But I think the habit of reading has been locked in for all of us at this point.

Once, when the whole house was sick, all the homeschooling we could muster up was reading a chapter or two aloud. Now it is part of every day. When someone is bored I send them to the books, if one of us needs some quiet time, I send them to the books, if we just have an odd amount of free time before a transition…I send them to the books. You get it. Regular library trips and a monthly chapter book are at the top of my plans list for this homeschool year.

Looking back, I’m grateful for everything that didn’t go according to plan—because that’s where the real learning happened, for both me and my kids. Homeschooling isn’t about perfection; it’s about adjusting, observing, and growing together. It’s about connection and understanding and leaning in and so much more.

If this homeschool year feels messy or uncertain, you’re not doing it wrong—you’re doing it bravely. Keep what works, let go of what doesn’t, and trust that you’ll find your groove as time goes on and you experience more of what homeschool can be. So far, that’s one of the realest truths here. And in life. With action comes clarity, so let’s do this.