As the days stretch out endlessly before us, the world has had to become creative in our endeavors to keep ourselves and our families nourished, entertained and sane. I was under the mistaken illusion that by being home more my son and I would fly through the rest of the school year and be able to get a great start on the next. Wrong. Like many of my fellow quarantined human beings, our days have slowed down and blurred together. I woke up one day to realize that the homeschool calendar was a week out-of-date. Yikes!!!
So, I decided that I needed to revamp our days and put us on a routine; one that would make us accountable for our days and still give us the slower pace to which we had become accustomed. When I began to research how other homeschoolers keep on task, I began to realize that younger children benefit from morning routines. Having always been a night owl with a crazy schedule, homeschooling took place during the evening and on my days off. Needless to say, that has not been working out for us during these first few months of the Coronavirus pandemic. Then I realized that I am home ALL the time and I had the power to restructure our days to achieve that which we decided was important to us.
I now schedule my days in two hour blocks. This allows me to get related activities done within each block in a more focused manner. For example, the first block is all about getting ready for the day. This includes exercise, breakfast, checking social media and light housekeeping. Next we move to the homeschool block. From there, I make lunch and take some time to relax or play with my little guy. After that, I do some work and then the next two hour block is dedicated to more housework and dinner. From there, I focus on my son again. We have our evening walk and then the ritual of getting ready for bed. After he is settled, then I can either do more work or I can take the evening off and binge watch Netflix.
I have been reading about setting routines with the block system for some time now, but it took a quarantine to get me to embrace the power of the idea. I think I resisted for so long because the blocks never seemed practical to me. Many people do four hour blocks and some do 1/2 hour blocks. Those never seemed right for me, so I just dismissed the idea. But when you look at different homeschool family schedules, you begin to notice that they all set their own block durations. That was not something that had occurred to me. As I let the idea continue to simmer in my mind, I took note of my natural tendencies and noticed I work best in two hour increments. I see that stepping out of my busy schedule has allowed me start listening to my inner self. It has been a real boon to my life, something that is allowing me to make the positive changes that I have always wanted to manifest.
The other change I have made is to make my son more accountable for the way he spends his hours. I have done this by creating a chart with all his homeschool subjects and chores prominently displayed. He must checkmark or star each item as it is completed. Now, he is eager to get everything done so he can mark the box and go play. As an added benefit, I now have a visual of what has been done each week. Kids thrive on routine, and they do even better when they know exactly what is expected of them. Of course this is working for now; but as I have learned from life and reading other homeschool blogs, I know that I will need to tweak the system at some point in the future. If you learn anything from this post, please remember: don’t be afraid of change. It is not that your ideas or system that have failed, it is that life is moving forward and you need to adapt. Just don’t take as long as I did to learn this lesson.