I will be honest and say, this has probably been my least favorite school year since we started in 2020. That statement has way more to do with my work load than with our actual homeschooling, but I just haven’t put much fun and extra love into school this year. We are literally just getting things done to check off the boxes.

While it bums me out, I do understand that this is okay, and I am proud of us for pushing through this slump. That said – I do want to change that for this second half of the year!

A few months ago, I was able to write a guest blog post for Homeschool SWLA‘s “Homeschooling Day in the Life” series. You can check that out here. This post shares our current daily routine, as well as the curriculum our kids are using this year. (You can also check out all the other posts in the series to see a little more variety of how other families homeschool!)

What is Working

Sunday Prep:
On Sundays, (though sometimes it’s not until Monday) I pull the past week’s school work out of my kids binders and add in the new week of work. (Comment on this post if you’d like me to explain more about how I prep their whole year of school into weeks over the Summer!) Before I start writing things in my planner, I make everyone finished their schoolwork and see if I need to roll over any schoolwork for the upcoming week. Then I start adding the page numbers for the work I want them to finish each day into my planner. Most of their Masterbooks work is already sorted by day so they know what to do without asking me, but every once in a while I need them to do more or less pages and this helps me have a reference to know where they need to stop at a glance. Then I re-write my oldest daughter’s school work into her own planner so she can check things off as she does them. After that, I grade any tests or quizzes that they may have worked on that week.

Doing School Inside:
I was having a rough time with my youngest children wrecking the whole school room, then us having to rush out to activities with no time to wait for them to tidy up, and THEN having to come back the next day to a messy school room. I don’t know about you, but mess immediately overwhelms me and I can’t focus on what we need to do. So we have been doing school inside where the kids already have a daily cleaning routine.

Things ARE Getting Done:
We are on Week 18 of school, so we are making progress through our school year at a normal pace.

What is NOT Working

Lack of Homeschool Room Cleaning
I need to figure out how to get the kids to tidy up the school room and still do all the things we need to do.

No Fun Activities
All the things I love about homeschool, we just aren’t doing. This makes school less exciting for me AND my kids. We used to do our school motto every day, as well as some fun daily songs to help the little kids learn their days of the week & months of the year. We also used to do “character studies” (which is what I called our mini unit studies on people from history) – which I just had so much fun making and then teaching them!

No Group Lessons
This goes along with the “no fun activities” because it’s just another thing I loved about us homeschooling. I loved when we did science and history together as a family, but now the oldest two are learning different things (and I have more littles to do school with) so they do their lessons independently.

The Plan for the Rest of the School Year

Honestly, the plan is to work on solving the three things I listed under “What is NOT Working”.

• I am already planning on doing a Martin Luther King Jr. unit study with the kids since that is this month.
  
• I have to prep my oldest two kiddos history for the rest of the school year, so that gives me an opportunity to see if we can add in any fun field trips or extra activities!
  
• As for the cleaning up in the homeschool room. We may have to invite my husband to do school with us one day. He thinks outside the box and I feel like he may be able to see a quick fix that I just am not seeing.

That’s all I got! We are on our 5th year of homeschool, and honestly it is always evolving to fit our current season. I am so thankful for this flexibility!

Let me know if you have any questions about anything friends 🙂