A different path to relaxed homeschooling

We want our children to be well educated. For most of us relaxed homeschooling families, we believe in the old saying, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,” by William Butler Yeats.

Have you ever looked at your homeschool and realized it wasn’t very relaxed and it wasn’t working?

That happened in our homeschool very recently. I thought since our schedule had worked so well the previous school year, I could essentially just cut and paste it to this school year.

But that hasn’t worked out at all. This autumn, we are processing through the grief of losing a very beloved family member over the summer. Our evening schedule is now very full all week long.

Repeating last year’s schedule isn’t going to work, and it won’t serve our family. And you know what? That is okay. As a relaxed homeschooling family, we have the flexibility to pivot at any point in the school year, even at the very beginning of it.

The Beginning of a Different Path for relaxed homeschooling

I realized after talking with another homeschooling mama that I didn’t want to look back on our homeschooling years and wish that I had done things differently. During the conversation with my friend, we talked about things we regretted not doing in our homeschool. We both specifically said it was the fun, creative things we wished we had left time for.

So, looking at our full school schedule, our full extracurricular schedule, and our small farm I started to adjust our very full schedule.

The changes weren’t drastic. I knew our basic subjects were covered with various curriculums that work well for my kids and our homeschool. We do follow a well-known Charlotte Mason curriculum and use most of the book recommendations. They are lovely for the elementary years. But when you get into the higher grade levels, the workload and book load increase significantly.

That was weighing down our school days. I went through the books and thoughtfully removed or replaced some of the books with ones of our choosing, documentaries, and lectures on the same subject as the book I removed.

Restructuring Our Days of Learning

I restructured our days of learning. The beginning of our homeschool week is usually not too busy until evenings. I decided to “frontload” the week with favorite books and subjects and then lighten the workload and add in the less loved books and subjects as the week progressed. I left time at the end of our week to catch up on any subject or assignment that got missed during the week.

This has worked quite well in bringing our overloaded homeschool day back to our preferred relaxed homeschool day. It also leaves time for our family learning, for discussion, meal times together, nature walks, and family read-alouds.

We need to make room for life-giving learning, for the messy and creative hands-on projects, for the long hours of going down rabbit trails. We need to give our kids time to “digest” what they have learned, to mull it over and make their own connections. In this way, we are creating lifelong learners.

Here are a few of my tried-and-true ways to bring your relaxed homeschooling back

Identify your priorities.

Every family’s priorities will be different, but one of ours is family learning. When that one falls away, our homeschool starts to feel less relaxed. We use the morning basket method for our family learning time. I have a post here that goes into more detail on it. Identify your family priorities and build your day around that.

Have plenty of margin in your day.

Making sure you have margin built into your day can be the difference between a good day and a hectic day
So what is margin? It’s small breaks in the day, such as five minutes in between subjects or scheduling a few extra minutes than you think a subject will take.
Adding this kind of margin to your day will help everyone feel like they have breathing room.

Weekly check-ins
One day a week, I like to check in with my kids. I check to make sure they are actually doing their work, find out if they are struggling with anything, and make a plan for the week with all of this in mind.
I like to go over the coming week with them so they know what to expect.

For us these simple steps create a more relaxed homeschooling day

I hope these tips will help you in your own homeschooling journey.