We are now beginning our tenth year of home schooling. I’ve got things running pretty smoothly at this point but it’s taken us quite awhile to get here. We have tried so many different ways of doing things and none of them have worked very well. But the way we do it now is pretty fool-proof and I’m loving it.
At first, I did try to plan the entire year out. I would go through an entire book and break it down into daily lessons and assign each lesson to a date in my lesson planner. Then I’d get the next book out and go back to the beginning of the planner and do the same thing. When I was done, I had every subject planned out to be broken into what to do each day. The trouble was, I had assigned those lessons to dates. And I had assigned how much had to be done in a given day. So even if we could keep up on math, we might fall behind three days in science and a week in history.
As you can imagine, this was a disaster. I had decided in August exactly what we were going to do on May 10 of the following year! What a mess. By the end of September we were, inevitably, “behind” and drowning because we had to “catch up”. But we were catching up to self-imposed deadlines that didn’t even matter! And I was making myself SICK over it.
I am gearing up to begin my tenth year of home schooling. TENTH YEAR. I find that hard to believe. I’ve learned a lot. Honestly, I’ve probably learned more than my kids. I’ve soaked up the chance to read books I didn’t have time for when I was in school. I’ve absolutely loved learning Latin and re-learning algebra, and so much more.
One of my school supply areas, in the corner of the living room. We do not have a school room in our 1200 square foot house! I love that these three machines do not take up much space and save me so much trouble!
But one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that there’s no substitute for the right tools. I’m cheap. I am one to always go the cheap route because I hate spending money more than anything else in the world. But over time I’ve learned that the right tools may cost more upfront but they save a lot of time and a lot of headaches along the way. And honestly, they save you money in the long term, too. Today I’m sharing with you the three tools that I could not live without in my home school day, why they are helpful, and the ways I tried to “save money” by avoiding them at first.
Boy, oh boy, is Marie Kondo and her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up a hot topic these days. Some people love her, some people hate her. But overall? Most people really misunderstand the heart of her method. There are memes, memes, everywhere making fun of the “spark joy” concept or the idea of only owning thirty books (Marie never actually enforces this, friends). And people are upset at the concept that she thanks the items before she donates them. And to all those people, I just want to say, “READ THE BOOK.” Marie Kondo’s method has completely changed our home–and our home school. But it required reading the book, not just reading a few memes or watching an episode on Netflix.
My fireplace, post-KonMari method is a reminder that my home is now a peaceful, calm place that I enjoy.
It’s easy to make fun of or disregard something that you don’t actually understand. For example, her Netflix special is very good but I feel like the editors never read the book because they completely missed her method in most of what they did. I have been sad for all the people who are decluttering their homes based on the Netflix show because they are going to attempt it completely wrong and it’s not going to work.
Another reminder to enjoy my home–and my home school.
Because the heart of Marie Kondo’s method is not actually about throwing out things that don’t spark joy (like the electric bill and your treadmill, as the memes say) and it’s not about talking to inanimate objects. And it is FOR SURE not about getting your book collection down to thirty books.
Our bookshelf after the KonMari method. The only books not up there are the ones we are using for school this year. Those get kept in our school supplies instead. The basket on the bottom shelf holds our current library books.
The KonMari method is about two things: dealing with your emotions and how they affect your house, and decluttering by category instead of by location.
Every other decluttering method on the planet tells you to clean out a bathroom or clean out a closet, and work from location to location. But that doesn’t work and that’s why your house ends up a cluttered mess again.
Instead, Marie has you work by category so that you have to face how much you really have. You see ALL your shoes and can assess whether or not you really need that many. You gather all your office supplies in one place and realize you have 500 pens and maybe you should stop buying them. You put all your books together and work through them. And when you put your stuff away, you keep those categories together from then on. So instead of having six piles of pens around the house, they are all together, always. Then you can SEE when you really need more
My pile when I was KonMari’ing all of our toiletries.
. And if you keep all your swim towels together, all your travel toiletries, all your extra blankets, etc, each in it’s own space, you can tell when you have too many or too much because the space becomes too crowded and you can thin it out a little bit. This means your entire house never again gets out of control because when you keep everything put away by category, you can quickly declutter a spot when you need to. You just have to put in the energy ONCE to get it done right and then the rest of your life, your house can stay organized.
Our living room during the very long KonMari process–it took us about four months from start to finish. It is a commitment to a marathon, it is not a weekend sprint.
It sounds crazy but it’s true. We KonMari’d our home three years ago and it’s still in working order, with three children running around. Of course, we have to resort through different categories as the kids grow and interests change. By now that we did the one BIG declutter, we can touch up small categories on an as-needed basis. And now every item in our home has a place. Guess what? The kids know those places as well and they all know how to clean up and put everything away. No matter how messy our house gets, it never, EVER, takes more than 45 minutes to have it completely put back together. Thank you, Marie Kondo. I have so much more time to myself, which is how I manage to write this blog, run an Etsy shop, home school my kids, AND direct Challenge B. I could not have done that before KonMari, plain and simple.
My Etsy shop office. It used to be a closet, overstuff with all kinds of junk. Now it’s a functioning office!
The other aspect of the KonMari method that seems to get tossed aside is the part where you deal with your emotions about items in your house. It’s not easy, friends. It’s not easy to pick up something that was a gift that was given to you by someone you aren’t friends with anymore and realize that every time you look at it, you feel sad and it’s time to let it go. It’s not easy to hold a book that you always meant to read and admit that you WISH you were the kind of person who was going to read that book but you just aren’t. And let that book go. It’s painful. It’s hard to give up clothes that you know are never going to fit again and admit that. It’s hard to hold things in your hand that bring back bad memories and say it’s time to kick those memories out of your home.
After finishing the process, we laid new floors in the ENTIRE house by ourselves. We couldn’t have done that when we were overrun by clutter. But it was possible after! We also were able to discover, by getting rid of so many things, what we really liked. And that made choosing a new couch fairly painless. We knew exactly the kind of furniture that sparked joy for us.
I’ll give you my biggest example from my KonMari journey. Someone gave us a free piano. Of course I said yes! We are home schoolers! Home schoolers are supposed to have a piano in the house. It’s like a RULE. But having that piano in our house made me feel guilty. Because we didn’t use it. There is nothing in life I hate more than listening to children play instruments poorly. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. Maybe that means I have to hand in my home school card. But it’s the truth. My kids do not take music lessons because I am not emotionally strong enough to listen to them practice. I’m just not.
And having that piano in the house made me feel like a failure. It whispered to me daily, a reminder that I wasn’t a perfect home school mom. That I wasn’t good enough. That I was failing. That I was an absolute, and total failure. But then I read Marie Kondo’s book and she taught me that what I needed to do was accept this part of myself and admit it freely! So, here I am telling you all, “I AM NOT THE KIND OF MOM WHO CARES IF MY KIDS TAKE MUSIC LESSONS!” What a weight off my shoulders! And that piano? It left my house, along with my insecurities and doubts and feelings of being a failure in that respect. Goodbye, piano, goodbye.
My kitchen cabinets had been dark wood and there was ugly apple wallpaper on the walls. But I didn’t have time to care or change things when all I did was fight our clutter. After the KonMari method, I was freed up to finally peel the wallpaper and paint the walls and cabinets to be something that makes me truly happy.
Marie asks you to work through those emotions with every item in your house. And obviously not every item in your home is going to draw out THAT kind of reaction. But you may be surprised by how many DO. I sure was. I let go of books on home schooling theory that left me feeling like I was not doing it right. I let go of stacks of books that “good classical educators MUST read”. I let go of supplies for science projects that I knew in my heart we were never going to get around to doing. But in that process, I also found some science supplies that I forgot we had that I really WANTED to dig into–so we did. And clearing out the piles upon piles of books that I “should have been reading” to my kids, I came out with a smaller pile of books that I loved and WANTED to read to my kids. We now only own books we LOVE. We get so many books from our amazing public library every week, we get to find out what we love and what is worth owning. And about once a year we go through our book collection and see if we’ve outgrown any of them and want to pass them along to someone else.
Working through the KonMari process helped me find focus, purpose, and peace in our homeschool. And you know what? The summer that we worked through the process (this is not a weekend project, expect it to take 3-6 months!), we discovered Classical Conversations. And I realized as I was finally truly discovering my goals and my purpose in home schooling, my shortcomings, and my strengths, that Classical Conversations was the perfect complement. It matched my goals and my purpose and made up for my shortcomings (the kids do art, science, and music at CC so I don’t have to feel any guilt when we don’t do those things at home!). And for me personally, Classical Conversations has really changed my life and given me so many opportunities for personal growth. So when Marie Kondo calls it “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” she’s not kidding. When you narrow down the items in your house to match what really matters to you, you end up finding out who you really are and where you belong.
Our CC wall. Before the KonMari process, I never would have been able to find a whole blank wall to create this and it is something I absolutely love.
We conquered clutter in our home. We didn’t just tackle it and we didn’t just declutter for the eleventh time. We conquered clutter. It is not a battle we face anymore. I mean, sure the kids grow and we have to sort through clothes to see what fits and what doesn’t. That doesn’t go away as long as you have children! But we conquered the need for so much stuff, we found a system that worked for us, and we’ve stuck with it for three years now and it has yet to let us down.
Loop scheduling has saved the day for us. Seriously, it has taken away all my mom guilt, all my frustration, and all my OCD issues with getting everything done on time. Because nothing ever got done on time and then I’d feel so discouraged and overwhelmed that it was easier to quit than keep going. Loop scheduling erases all those issues. Really, it’s like a magic cure. And it’s SO SIMPLE. I had read about the concept for a couple of years and I don’t know why I was so stubborn about piecing it all together and actually doing it. It’s working. It’s changing everything about our home school day but most importantly, it’s changing my attitude and mindset.
See back in the beginning of our home school journey, I would plan the entire year out before we began. I even typed it. I had what we were going to do every single day for all the 180 days of school we needed to complete. It was a disaster. By about two months in, I’d feel behind and rushed and overwhelmed and always trying to catch up. There is no joy in learning when there’s that much stress. Loop scheduling has fixed that for us.
What is loop scheduling? Well, you can read more about it here, but essentially, it’s just making a whole year of lesson plans for each subject and putting them in a list format. And then you don’t assign the lessons to a date. On the first day of your school year, you start at Day one of history, then day one of science, and so on. If you get through all your subjects, you stop. If you have a busy afternoon and only get through two subjects, that’s OK! You just pick up where you left off the next day. You are never behind because you just keep looping through the subjects.
Most of us are wrapping up our school years right about now. The sun’s been shining, the weather’s warming up, and the kids are playing outside! It’s the most wonderful time of the year, isn’t it?
Time to play outside!
You may be anxious to shove all your curriculum into an out-of-the-way place and forget about it. But before you do, I highly recommend taking a few days to assess yourself and how the home school year went for you. I’d suggest adding your assessment to your planner so that when you begin working on next year’s school plan you can see your notes and thoughts and use it to work out what you want next year’s plan to look like.
A few of our favorite things in our morning basket.
I can’t stop raving about the way that loop scheduling and a morning basket have completely changed our home school mornings around here. It’s only been two weeks since we made this change and already I know that this is IT. This is what works for us.
So what is IN our morning basket? It’s not a simple answer of a particular curriculum or collection. I pulled from all different places but mostly I pulled from my curriculum shelf. I looked at all the things I purchased with such good intentions that we’d FOR SURE use that and then life gets crazy and schedules go off course and we’d quit. But that’s why loop scheduling is helping us now, because when you loop, you are never behind. You just pick up where you left off and keep on rolling. Continue reading “What’s In Our Morning Basket?”
Home school mamas, I think I’ve finally done it. I think I’ve finally figured out THE method that is going to work for our home school.
But let’s back up a little. While I know my kids are learning and growing and covering material, our home school has not looked the way I really want it to the past few years… or maybe ever. I have tried many different methods for making it work.
The first couple of years, I lesson planned the entire year before we began. I had a page for every school day for the year and exactly what we needed to do that day, including art supplies, library books, and everything else we might need.
That worked for about two weeks each year. Because what would happen is we’d get through half a day and something would come up–a phone call, a headache, an unplanned doctor’s visit–and then that day wasn’t finished and so we’d pick up where we left off the next day and try to do 1.5 days of work and then before you know it we are a whole week behind and feel like we are drowning and once you reach that point, it’s over.
If you’ve spent any amount of time on Pinterest–and be honest, we all have–you’ve probably noticed an overwhelming number of posts about home school classrooms. They are always big, and beautiful, and magazine-worthy. And quite frankly, I think sometimes they can scare off families who are thinking about home schooling but only have a small space to use for school.
Guess what? You don’t need a classroom to home school! And I am living proof of that. My house is pretty small–there are five of us living in 1200 square feet. We use every inch of this small space all day long. Besides home schooling three children, I am a director for Classical Conversations and I run an Etsy shop. Sometimes my CC class even meets at my house.
So where do we home school in our house without a Pinterest Perfect classroom?
Loop scheduling has saved the day for us. Seriously, it has taken away all my mom guilt, all my frustration, and all my OCD issues with getting everything done on time. Because nothing ever got done on time and then I’d feel so discouraged and overwhelmed that it was easier to quit than keep going. Loop scheduling erases all those issues. Really, it’s like a magic cure. And it’s SO SIMPLE. I had read about the concept for a couple of years and I don’t know why I was so stubborn about piecing it all together and actually doing it. It’s working. It’s changing everything about our home school day but most importantly, it’s changing my attitude and mindset.
Home school mamas, I think I’ve finally done it. I think I’ve finally figured out THE method that is going to work for our home school.