The NO STRESS Way to Start a New Homeschool Year

Are you stressed at the thought of starting a new homechool year? It doesn't have to be this way. I want to share with you the no stress way to beginning a new homechool year. [Music] If this is your first time on my channel, my name is Sherry. I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. My husband and I have been married for 25 years, and I love encouraging other moms here on my YouTube channel and on the blog, rlifehomeschooling.com. I know what it's like to be in the thick of it. Especially when I had young kids, it was just a lot. a lot of meals, dishes, sitting with little ones, sometimes crying over double- digit multiplication and things like that. I remember what it's like. So, I love encouraging moms who are just a little bit behind me. You can do this. We are still in summer mode completely. We're still getting a lot of food in from our garden. This is peak harvest time. Yesterday, we canned 10 quarts of diced tomatoes. We had two huge buckets of green beans that we were cutting and freezing. We have tons of peppers coming in. So, this is a really busy time for us. Our minds were still in the thick of summer. Today, we were out somewhere and we ran into someone and he asked my daughter, "Are you sad that summer is over?" And of course, she answered really nicely. But afterwards, I thought to myself, "Come summer isn't over. I don't get into all the back to school hype because summer isn't over. And we got into the car with the kids and I kind of got on my little soap box and I said to the kids, "Summer ends when fall begins and fall begins September 22nd at the autumn equinox." And so we are still in summer mode and I don't want to be rushed out of summer just because everyone else is going back to school. I don't get into the back to school hype. I know some people love it and I like the back to school shopping. That's fun, but I don't like to be rushed out of summer. We start our school year very slowly. It's a slow start for us. And I know that as a homeschooler, we could completely adjust our schedule because of the work we do here on our homestead with all the gardening, all the animals we have. But truthfully, the time that we spend planting, growing, harvesting is just a longer time than the time we have off from what's required by law for the days we need to complete. So, we just stick to a traditional school calendar, but we take our days very lightly. We have a slow start. And then we kind of get more serious around October and November. Those are times when we get a lot done. take a break for Christmas and then January through March we probably get twice as much done. Homeschooling has become a lifestyle for us. If I were to keep track on paper how many hours that we do school throughout the year, we would have more than 180 days. I am absolutely convinced. So, I am totally okay with having a slower start in the month of September and then just getting a lot more done in the winter months when it's cold and we're stuck inside most of the time anyway. So, on paper, we start usually the last week in August and end about the second week in May. But summer is not over for us. It's a slow start and we just start simply. And I often wonder how many other parents are feeling this pressure. This seems to be the talk right now. If you go anywhere, the grocery store, the dentist office, anywhere you go, everyone's asking, "Are you ready to go back to school?" And it's this pressure. And many moms feel overwhelmed at the thought of starting a new homechool year. It doesn't have to be this way. I would encourage you not to give in to all this hype. You are a family, not a school. So, your family comes first. And if summer ends when fall begins, which is September 22nd, you can still enjoy all of that summer that you have left. And you can start slowly or some people just do year- round schooling and make it fit around their family's life, which I think is perfect, especially for people that live in places that are hotter year round. But many parents do keep to a traditional school calendar just like we do on paper especially. And we are starting in the next week or so, but when we start, it is a slow start. And I just want to encourage any other moms, if you're like me, especially because this is a busy time of year for us, you can just start. You don't have to have everything figured out. You don't have to have everything planned out. Um, one of my favorite homeschool moms is Nikki Truselle and she says homeschooling is just parenting with books. You just open the books and you begin again. I think sometimes as homeschool moms, we see everything that people have on Instagram. We see all these school rooms set up in this amazing way. all this beautiful homeschool decor, all these checklists and schedules and plans and ideas, and we begin to think that that is what makes a good homeschool mom or that's what makes someone good at homeschooling. And we all want to do really well with our kids. But homeschooling is just an extension of parenting. It is just opening the books and beginning that book work again. Some of us, like myself, haven't really left off of it. We did a lot of reading aloud during the summer. I want to tell those of you who are a little overwhelmed at the thought of having everything together for that first day of school, you can just start. You can open the books again. And I would start with a very simple plan. Plan less. You don't have to have it all figured out on the first day. In fact, I would encourage you not to have everything planned out because I think back to the many years that I was homeschooling and I got into this back to school thing and had everything planned and scheduled out. And what happened was when I actually went and we actually began our school year, those ideas were great ideas on paper, but they just didn't work in real life. And this is where I would really encourage you to find moms who have been homeschooling a while and take their advice. Listen to what they say. You don't have to just listen to me. This is our 15th year of homeschooling, but find someone that's been doing it a while because while the accounts and the influencers on Instagram, on Facebook are all some of them are exciting. A lot of them have only been homeschooling for a year, 2 years, and they are still learning a lot. It's okay to start with less plans on paper. Now, I realize some of you love the back to school planning. Some of you get into it, and this is fun. So, I don't want to steal your joy if you love doing that, and I was like that a lot at the beginning. It's okay to get so excited about the plans you have, but just remember that when you actually work through your day, it might look a little differently and your plans may not execute as perfectly as you have them planned out in your mind or even on paper. So, plan less. Start with simple plans. You can always add more later. When we start with our slow start, we just start with morning time reading, writing and math and then our afternoon read aloud. So it's very very simple and this leads me to the second point which is to have a very basic routine and leave margin in your day. Sometimes with all the back to school talk and planning and thinking that you need to have everything ready for that first day, we forget about the things that need to happen in a home. Things that we just don't you don't think of because they're not schoolish. But the baby's diaper needs to be changed. The baby might have a blowout. There's nap time. There's music lessons. There are meals to be made. There's a house to be cleaned up because we're living in a home. We're not in a sterile building. This is a home where things are constantly moving, constantly changing. People need to be fed. Babies are tired and they need naps. So, plan less and leave margin in your day for these types of things that happen in a home. Focus on having a simple routine. And if you want to know a little bit more about this, a couple weeks ago I did a video called Back to the Basics. And it really lays out very plainly what I would do if I were starting from scratch. The layers that I would add in, there are four layers. And once you get the first one, then you can add on to the second one, the third one, and then the last. Back to the basics. Have a simple routine. Leave time in your day for things that happen naturally in a home. Thirdly, focus on your family relationships and the atmosphere in your home. Do your kids respect you? Are you having difficulty telling them something to do and having them follow through on it? If you're trying to get your child to do their math lesson and they can't follow a simple instruction of making their bed or picking up their toys, then you're not going to get very far. Is there a basic level of respect in your home for you as the mom? Do you have order in your home? I've talked about this many times. When I started out homeschooling, I was so intimidated, having come from a public school teaching background. I wanted to make sure we were keeping up. I was very academic. I'll probably always lean that way even though I've changed so much and we do so many more life skills, but I was intimidated. And so our academic work was the complete focus sometimes to the detriment of our home. And we did not do as great of a job as we do now keeping up with our daily chores and making sure that our home is just a beautiful place before we add in that book work. And everybody is more excited about learning when there's a nice calm, peaceful place to learn in. when they know that the meals are going to be made on time and then everything's going to be clean after we finish eating. Make your home atmosphere a priority and let the book work fit into the margins of your day. The most important thing, of course, in the atmosphere in your home is the relationships that you have with your kids and the relationships that they have with each other. And if this is something that you see that you need to work on, then make that the focus. I learned this when our oldest son started hitting middle school. I had been so academic and then I started seeing how little time I had left with him and all of the sudden all those metrics went out the window and all I cared about was this window of time that I had left with him that was closing. And it's the same for you. You will not believe how quickly these years pass by. And soon you will have a graduate. I have a graduate. I can hardly believe it. Our second son is graduating this year. It goes by so quickly. The relationships you have with your kids are the most important thing. And this is why we homeschool. We don't have to do everything the way people do it in school. We can focus on relationships and our kids can still have a great education. So make the home atmosphere and the relationships in your family top priority. All right. So, I'm going to finish just by telling you what we're going to be doing on our first day of school. Now, some years I will say I did like to do something fun for the first day of school. And um I may be able to pull that off this year. Not sure. And it's okay if you don't. You don't have to. Many years, one of my favorite things to do was to buy each child a book and wrap it up and they had a new book to open on the first day of school. That was fun. This year we have a lot on our plate just with our calendar and the different things that are going on with our kids. So, um, we're probably not going to be doing that this year and I'm okay with that. We do lots of fun things throughout the year. Our very first day of school, we're going to start with morning time. And for us, I've created a simple morning time notebook that I'm going to be using for the whole year. This is something that if you are looking for something you just don't know where to start with a morning time, you can get this notebook for $9 on the blog. I'll leave a link for you below. This is all the memory work, the composer study, um the art study, the Bible verses that we're going to be doing, the hymns, uh grammar, we do math review. I've already done this homework for you. So, if you're scrambling and morning time is something you haven't even gotten to yet, but you'd like to do it, you can get this. It's very affordable. I've made it that way on purpose for families. So, we're going to start with morning time. I'll probably read a passage of scripture. We'll say some of the memory verses. We always watch World Watch. And then after that, we'll start with the second part of our day, which is our chores. Now, we've been doing this throughout the summer anyway. So, this isn't really anything extra. Um, it's pretty much what we're already doing. Um, but such an important part of our day because it just gets our home to that place of peace and order. And then the third part is where my kids usually work on their independent work. For this, I will probably write on the whiteboard the things that I want everyone to start with. And like I mentioned, it is a slow start for us. So, we focus on reading, writing, and math. I'll have them open up their books to where they finished in math and just begin the next lesson. In this way, we really do just open up the books and begin again. I don't always have a checklist for my kids on the very first day of school. The very first day of school is where we open everything back up again and we look at what we need to do. So, I might sit down and start a checklist with some of my kids on the first day or the second day, but they get out their math books and do the first lesson and then they get out something to write. So, if they finish the year in the middle of copy work, then they'll just pick that up where they left off or I'll probably pull out some copy work and I'll get it all set up for them on that day. And then I will check in with each of my kids to see what book they're currently reading. So, our independent work will start slowly. The last thing we do is something that we've been doing occasionally, and that is to read aloud in the afternoon, and we're already in the middle of some books. So, I will probably start thinking again about the books that I plan to do for the next year. Now, this works for us because I've been homeschooling for several years. We're beginning our 16th year. If you're a new homeschooler, this obviously does not apply to you. You're going to have to be learning brand new routines. You're going to be starting from scratch. So, you're going to have to do a little bit more than just opening and starting again. And if this is you, I also did a video called What You Need to Know as a Firsttime Homeschooler. I'll link that for you for those of you that are starting out for the first time. But if you have been homeschooling for a couple of years, you know what curriculum you're using. You have your basic routines down, you don't have to be overwhelmed and you don't have to have everything planned out at the very beginning. You can just start. I've done it many years. It's a slow start and it's honestly just very relieving to know that if I want to have special plans, I can. But you don't have to. We are a family first of all and our family life comes first. Homeschooling has become very much an atmosphere in our home. Sometimes we do more book work than other times. For example, January through March, we do probably twice as much. And that's why after 15 years of homeschooling, I can be much more relaxed about how we start. And I want to encourage you that you can too. If this is you and you're overwhelmed at the thought of starting a new home school year, stop putting so much pressure on yourself. Just open the books, start with the very basics, reading, writing, and math, and begin again. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear from those of you who have started school or will be starting soon. Tell me how you start a new homeschool year and especially what you do to start simply in ways that keep it from becoming too stressful for your family. Thanks for listening. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.