7 Tips to Help You Balance Homeschooling and Housework

Hi friends, it's Sheri from the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com. I want to tell you about seven tips that I've learned over the years of how to balance homeschooling and housework. If this is your first time on my channel, I want to introduce myself. My name is Sheri. I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. I've been married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson, for 24 years. This is our 15th year of homeschooling. We have one graduate, we have seven in school, and then two preschoolers. I love coming on my channel every week and encouraging other moms. I love bringing you alongside of us, letting you see what a day in the life looks like in our homeschool. Sometimes, I think it helps to just see someone else do it, and I want to invite you to come into our home from time to time on the videos that I show to just see and hopefully be encouraged in what you're doing with your kids. Now, before I get started, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on over on the blog. I write on the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com. You will find a ton of homeschooling help over there. I have probably 50 posts all on homeschooling encouragement. If you just need to be encouraged, some advice, some help, something that's going to build you up, you can find plenty of that on the blog. I also have some help for homeschooling a large family, several posts about that. Another one that I have is tens of book lists. The most recent book list I did was the Creepy Crawly Fascinating Bug Book List for Kids. I want to show some of these to you. When I teach science, I've used Apologia. I've used a couple different things, but sometimes I like to go off the map and just get out a whole bunch of really great picture books all centered around a theme or a topic. This one is bugs. I found some great books about bugs for kids. This is The Big Book of Bugs by Yuval Zomer. All the Eric Carle books he has, The Hungry Caterpillar, Grouchy Ladybug, The Very Busy Spider, those are really cute. This is National Geographic Kids. This one is great. These are just a couple of the books in that post, but if you head over to the blog, you can find the whole blog post and see all the books on my list. If you're interested in doing a unit study or if you have a child that just loves insects or is fascinated with bugs, this is a really fun study to do with your kids. How do you balance homeschooling and housework? That is something I want to tackle today. I want to give you seven tips. First of all, I want to tell you that I am talking about this topic from the perspective of someone that has learned by trial and error. Everything I'm sharing with you today really is what I have learned from failures. I started out homeschooling 15 years ago, and I had never been homeschooled before. My husband hadn't been homeschooled. It was a completely new concept to us. Both of us grew up in homes where kids weren't home all day long. We were in school, so having all of our kids home with me was something that was a brand new concept, so learning how to manage that alone was a lot. Keeping a house when you have kids in it all day was something that was a foreign concept to me and something brand new that I just had to figure out how to make it work. Add to that homeschooling. Homeschooling was also something completely new, and it really was a double whammy for me. If I'm being completely honest, keeping the house clean and keeping up with homeschooling was something that was always probably one of my biggest challenges. We have 10 kids, so we were always adding more. No sooner would I feel like I was getting ahead of things, getting on top of things, and we would have another baby. You know when you have a baby that your home is a little bit in survival mode for the first six months, a year, until you just adjust to that new family member. The newness of having kids in our home all day, as well as learning how to homeschool, those two things were something that I had to learn by trial and error. So I'm not sharing these tips from anything that I've read in a book, from anything that I've studied. These are things that I've learned over the years from the experience of homeschooling our 10 kids and keeping a home. The first tip is to have an established chore system and make it a part of your school day. I used to think that if we could just get past the initial clean up in the morning, if everyone did their chores, that we could just, then we could finally get to the important part of homeschooling. And it always seemed like an obstacle. I could never get the house clean enough for us to start. And when my kids were little, the learning curve of homeschooling itself really was something that made me put my housework probably a little bit to a back burner. Not that things were crazy or anything, but I just had to figure out how to make this homeschooling thing work. And our home was not always as neat as I would have liked it to be, which once we got going in homeschooling, that started catching up with me. And I realized we've got to, now we got this homeschooling thing, but we've got to figure out how to make this work with keeping our house clean. Our kids have always had chores. We knew this early on in parenting that it's good for them. The first chores that I give them are make your bed, get dressed, brush your teeth. And that's something that even a three-year-old can begin doing. But as they get older and you add household chores in with that, make your household chores part of the schoolwork. So I tell my kids, your chores are your first schoolwork. Whether you start that before breakfast, whether you do it after breakfast, which is what we're doing right now, it's your first schoolwork. It's part of the process. Learning how to keep a home is a life skill. Learning how to clean a bathroom is a life skill. And it's something that maybe you can teach someone in a 15-minute tutorial, how to clean a bathroom. But the daily maintenance of keeping up with a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, different areas of the house, that is something that takes repeated practice. So have a chore system, some kind of chore plan, and make it part of your schoolwork So your kids understand that this is something else that's part of our day, just like math or reading or science. The second tip is to prioritize your housework above your schoolwork. So when you have a clean home, everyone can learn more easily. Everyone is in a better mood. It just sets the tone for everything. This is why I think it really needs to be a priority, and that's what I learned over time. It took me a while to come to that understanding. So if you're having what I like to call a slow slide, for example, over time, just slowly things are gathering under the sofa or just little knickknacks are piling up on the island or the kitchen counter or whatever it is in your home. If you're noticing a slow slide and all of a sudden the idea of having company or having someone stop by is really intimidating, this might be a time when you need to just stop, do a reset. We've had days like this where we'll just stop school and we will work together on the house. I divide it up by zone usually and give each of my kids a different area and just refresh the house. And when you stop and make this a priority for a day, what I've found happens is that sometimes it takes a while. We may be working until 10 or 11 o'clock, but we almost always get done in time to do a little bit of schoolwork. We still can get the basics in, reading, writing, and math. Take a day if you need it. If you notice that there's a slow slide happening in your house and you need to just get everything back together, you can take a day to just focus on your housework. And that's going to help you to be able to move forward in a way that everyone can peacefully learn in the right kind of learning environment. The third tip is check, check, check their work. So when you give chores or when for us, we have our kids, if they want to have screen time, we have screen days, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. If they want to get their screen time, they have to have a clean bedroom. And this helps us to regularly be cleaning their bedrooms, be checking their bedrooms. If you're not checking your kids' chores, they are going to be getting away with things. That's what I've observed. You really have to check their work and I get pretty specific with mine. Pick out little things and they may not like it, but over time they know, if they know that you're going to be checking it, they are going to work a little harder and they're going to make sure it's clean. And over time it will become cleaner and cleaner. Another tip is to eliminate as much clutter as possible. This is one that's made a huge difference in our household. When you have a lot of people, if each person is just leaving out a couple things, it just accumulates so much. So we got to a point where we just, I couldn't have toys on our main floor. Now our house is probably set up a little differently than yours. That may be the case, but for us, the way our house is set up, we have no toys on the main floor except for one tub of toys that I will let them have and they can exchange it with a different tub from the garage from now on. In this one we have Legos, we've had, I'm trying to think, different blocks, Lincoln logs, basically toys that are raw materials, so they can have that one. They have some toys in their bedrooms, but those we try to keep to a minimum as well. What we've done is I have a couple wardrobes in our garage where we store some of the toys that I don't want to get rid of because they're ones that my kids really do play with, but we rotate them in and out. And we try to keep our main floor clear of any toys. Yes, toys still do make it into our main floor, but they have no place to keep them here. So they have to either go back up to their bedroom, sometimes things will trickle in from the garage, but we just have to take them back out there because there's no place for them here. I don't have any toy boxes or any baskets for toys down here. And that really helps us to be able to have a clear space and to make the cleanup not so hard every morning. My fifth tip is to use money as an incentive. Money talks. So there are some chores that are above the normal ones. So normally we do, we have living room, school room, kitchen. We have someone cleaning the upstairs bathroom. Like I said, we divide it into zones. These are just someone doing the kitchen, of course. These are normal everyday chores, but we have some things that are just areas that need organized or matching socks is one we've always done that we'll pay our kids to do. And this just helps us to get ahead in some of those areas where I just can't keep up. Another way that we've used money as an incentive is specifically with our teenagers. So if you have an older child that knows what's expected, that knows that they have to clean up after themselves, they have to have a clean room, they have to make their bed, they have to keep all their school stuff in a certain area, but they're just not following through on that. And when that happens, it means that I have a lot more work to do. And now I have to do their work on top of my work. And so we've told our teenagers, if we have to do your work, then you're going to have to pay us to do it. And so this may not be popular, but it works. It's not fair to the family if I can't do my job because I have to do someone else's job. So use money as an incentive. And I think, obviously, within reason, charging money is definitely a last resort, something we only do with older kids. But like I said, it's not fair to the family if I have to do my work and a couple other people's work because they're not taking care of their space and cleaning up after themselves. Another tip, and this is one that should be so obvious, but it took me many years to figure this one out. If you have just random things that you're finding, just problem areas in your home, have a family meeting. So whenever you sit down, maybe when you put the kids to bed, maybe during morning time, whatever it is, if there are things you notice, and I'm thinking just random items, like someone's not hanging their towels up in the bathroom, or maybe a spot in your house where everyone's just leaving their junk. If you have different problem areas, have a family meeting and sit down and target them. Just talk about how these things have to change. Just outline it. And maybe even if you have a whiteboard, just write them down, make it visible for people to see. But sitting down, gathering everyone, and just addressing it. This is something that should be obvious, but it's something that I really, I think it's only the past maybe five years that I started doing this. Just addressing it, taking everyone together and just addressing the problem areas. The next tip is if you are overwhelmed, a general rule of thumb is that your kids can do more. And I was reading recently a study where it talked about how kids that have chores, kids that are taught to work from a young age are more confident, they're more capable because they can do more tasks, they're familiar with different skills. Over the years, maybe you can relate to this, I had many times where I would get frustrated because I was in the kitchen for so long. I couldn't get outside, I couldn't get to some of the hobbies and the things that I wanted to enjoy. I was spending so much time serving my family by cleaning up, making meals. And when this happens, when the mom feels exhausted, if you feel overworked, if you get depressed, it's a great time to reassess, can my kids do more to help me? One person should not be doing all the work. Your kids and you should, everyone should be working together to make the house run. That should be the motto. Everyone works together to get it done. So if you find yourself overworked, and sometimes when you have all little kids, there is not any easy way around this. There is a period of time when they're all young that you are doing a lot of foundational work until you get a couple older kids that can do more. But a general rule of thumb is, if you're overwhelmed, if you're exhausted, your kids can help you more. Find ways that they can contribute to the work that you have to do. And the last thing I want to leave with you is to remember that your house is a home. It's to be a loving, warm environment for your children to grow in. It's not supposed to be a showcase for a Southern Living magazine. Your home is a place for your family. Now the Bible says, where there are no oxen, the crib is clean. So if you have an empty house, it's easy to keep it clean. But much increase comes by strength of the ox. So if you have a lot of children, a lot of people in your home, if you're managing a lot, then it's not going to be pristine. It's not going to be perfectly clean. But you are accomplishing a lot. You're producing a lot. So think of your home that way. It's a tool. It's a place for your children to grow. It's a place for you to be useful and productive and creative. Sometimes creativity, that means mess. When my kids want to do something creative, a part of me gets excited and a part of me thinks this is going to really make a mess. And sometimes that just keeps me from wanting them to do it. But I know it's good. Your home is not supposed to be a place that's perfect. It shouldn't always be spotless. Your kids live here. And that can be difficult, especially if you have a lot of friends whose kids are gone all day. And they can keep their homes beautiful. They can keep it empty. They can keep it pretty clean and keep things up because it's not being used that much. Your house is being used a lot because there are kids in it. There are kids coming in and out of it. They're putting fingerprints on the walls. But you are raising children. And your house is being used as a home. So remember that when you are trying to balance housework and homeschooling. I hope this has been helpful to you. If you have some tips for balancing homeschooling and housework, would you please leave them below so other people can get some ideas and it may help them as well. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week offering homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next time.