The first few weeks of a homeschool year can tell you a lot.
Maybe your new math curriculum is working even better than you hoped. Maybe mornings are going smoothly, everyone likes the new history program, and you’re wondering why you worried so much over the summer.
Or maybe you’ve already discovered a few things that looked much better on paper than they do in your actual house.
Either way, this is a good time to pay attention to the little things that can make homeschooling easier to sustain over the next several months. You don’t need to rebuild your school calendar, replace all your curriculum, or make a dramatic change to your routine.
Sometimes preventing burnout is much simpler than that.
A 15-minute morning tradition, dropping an unnecessary workbook page, moving one difficult subject to a better time of day, or finding another homeschool mom to talk to can make a noticeable difference.
Here are seven things you can do during the school year to help your family keep going strong.
1. Start the Day With Something Everyone Enjoys
If your homeschool morning goes straight from breakfast into the subject everyone likes least, consider adding a softer start.
One popular approach is Morning Time, sometimes called a Morning Basket. The basic idea is simple: gather everyone together for a short period of something enjoyable before moving into individual schoolwork.
This does not need to become another curriculum.
You might spend 15 or 20 minutes reading a book aloud, listening to music, reading the Bible, learning a poem, looking at a piece of art, or working through an interesting book together.
A Morning Basket might include:
- a family read-aloud
- Bible reading or a devotional
- poetry
- music or composer study
- art appreciation
- memory work
- an interesting nonfiction book
You certainly don’t need to include all of those.
The goal is to create a small ritual that your family enjoys and that helps everyone ease into the school day. And unlike many homeschool changes, you can start this one tomorrow morning without rearranging the rest of your year.
2. Fix the Part of the Day That Keeps Going Wrong
By a few weeks into the school year, you may already notice a pattern.
Perhaps math is miserable immediately after breakfast but goes much better later in the morning. Maybe everyone loses focus after lunch. Perhaps one child continually needs your help at the same time another child is waiting for you to teach a lesson.
You don’t necessarily have a bad homeschool schedule. You may just have one bad spot in it.
Instead of redesigning the whole day, identify the recurring point of frustration and experiment with that one piece.
You could:
- switch the order of two subjects
- move the hardest subject earlier or later
- give one child independent work while you teach another
- add a short snack or movement break before the part of the day when everyone starts dragging
- stop saving the most parent-intensive lesson for the time of day when you’re already tired
Small changes are much easier to evaluate than a complete schedule overhaul. If Wednesday mornings are consistently terrible, figure out what’s making Wednesday mornings terrible before deciding your whole homeschool plan has failed.
3. Stop Doing Work Just Because the Book Printed It
Curriculum publishers have to create materials that work for thousands of different children.
You only have to teach yours.
That means you do not necessarily need to complete every problem, question, worksheet, review page, enrichment activity, and optional project included in a curriculum.
If your child clearly understands how to multiply fractions after completing ten problems, another twenty may not accomplish much besides making both of you dislike math.
The same applies elsewhere. You may not need every comprehension question after a reading assignment. You don’t have to complete three projects for a history chapter when your child would learn plenty from one. A child who has mastered a spelling rule may not need another week of practice because the teacher’s guide says so.
There’s an important difference between skipping work because something is difficult and skipping work because it has become unnecessary.
Learning to recognize that difference can save time on concepts your children learned quickly and allow for giving more difficult concepts the time your children need later on in the semester/year.
Curriculum is a tool. Allow yourself to use the parts that serve your child and try to avoid treating every page as absolutely essential material.
This year, I’m teaching our kiddos Geometry. Kristina has taken the reins for much of the homeschooling, but she has a lot on her plate with us adding on to our homestead this year, and math is one of my strong areas, so I offered to take that over.
We’ve been using Teaching Textbooks for math for years (it’s awesome!), specifically the video curriculum. While our students have seen great success with Teaching Textbooks, last year, some of the concepts from Algebra were a struggle, and (I have to admit) we really hadn’t looked closely enough at the course to see the problem, or rather, problems….
There were far too many.
Each lesson simply had too many problems to solve as part of a daily lesson, and it was overwhelming our children. Once we realized this, I stepped in to transition the class to in-person, on paper, and I taught lessons and assigned problems for homework from the options listed for each lesson. Rather than doing everything assigned, we only did the problems that either helped them learn a new concept, strengthened an area of weakness, or solidified a concept that we’ll use in an upcoming lesson.
That method has continued this year with Geometry. We do the lesson, and I assign about half of the problems for them to do on their own, and I make myself available to help while they do their homework. This one change has made math feel much less stressful for our family.
Did it suddenly make math “easy”? No. But it has made math feel achievable.
Sometimes that’s the biggest difference between being stressed and being challenged in a healthy way: making a task feel achievable for your students.
Rather than looking at the plethora of problems they are asked to solve, our children are now tasked with solving a reasonable amount, and the problems are hand-picked based on what concepts they need to review, practice, and solidify in their minds.
I don’t say this to act as if the curriculum was wrong by assigning that many problems; I instead see this as their presenting a buffet of problems, and we get to choose from that buffet to meet the needs of our kids’ education. This kind of mindset and flexibility when it comes to approaching purchased curriculum can save a lot of frustration and heartache in your homeschooling. Take every assignment, problem, and reading as an option to choose from rather than a mandatory action.
4. Keep Your Records From Becoming Another Source of Stress
Recordkeeping is easy to procrastinate on because it rarely feels urgent.
Then several weeks pass, and suddenly you’re trying to remember whether the museum visit was in August or September, which chapter your child finished three Tuesdays ago, and whether you ever wrote down that science project.
The simplest solution is to make recordkeeping a small, regular habit instead of a giant catch-up project.
Depending on what your state requires and what you personally want to keep, that might mean recording:
- school days or hours
- completed activities
- grades
- books read
- extracurricular activities
- projects
- field experiences or educational outings
Homeschool Hall’s Activity Journal is designed for keeping track of activities, grades, and hours as you go.
Whatever system you use, try to update it often enough that it doesn’t turn into another task hanging over your head. A few minutes of recordkeeping regularly is much easier than reconstructing a month of homeschooling from memory.
5. Find Other Homeschoolers to Do Life With
Even if homeschooling itself is going wonderfully, doing everything without much connection to other people can wear on you over time.
Community doesn’t have to mean joining a large co-op that takes over an entire day of your week.
Maybe it’s a church where several other families homeschool. Maybe your kids participate in a local sports program. Maybe you meet another family at the park every couple of weeks, join a casual social group, or find a few moms you can text when you need to ask, “Is anybody else’s child doing this?”
Those relationships can be especially valuable when you’re new to homeschooling. Experienced homeschool parents can often reassure you that something is normal, suggest a local resource you didn’t know existed, or help you solve a problem they encountered several years ago.
If you’re still trying to find those connections, the Homeschool Hall Directory can help you find local homeschool groups, co-ops, tutors, sports programs, classes, and other resources nearby.
You don’t need to fill your calendar with homeschool activities. You just don’t have to do this entirely by yourself.
6. Give Your Children More Ownership Where You Can
Mom doesn’t have to be involved in every minute of every subject.
As children get older and become capable of working more independently, letting them take ownership of appropriate parts of their school day can benefit everyone.
That might mean having a child:
- check the day’s assignments independently
- gather his or her own school materials
- complete a familiar subject without you sitting nearby
- choose which of two subjects to do first
- keep track of completed work
- read directions before asking for help
- prepare materials for a simple activity
Obviously, a first grader and a high schooler should not have the same level of independence. But even younger children can gradually learn that Mom is available to teach and help without needing to manage every pencil stroke.
This isn’t only about making your day easier, either. Learning to manage responsibilities is valuable in itself.
If you find yourself constantly reminding, fetching, checking, organizing, and directing things your child is already capable of handling, choose one responsibility and hand it over.
7. Pay Attention to Irritation Before It Becomes Exhaustion
Burnout rarely arrives one morning completely out of nowhere.
More often, little frustrations pile up.
You start dreading science because setup takes longer than the experiment. A child groans every time a particular workbook comes out. You’re spending 45 minutes every evening preparing something that saves ten minutes the next morning. A weekly activity everyone once enjoyed has become something nobody wants to attend.
Those things are worth noticing.
Every few weeks, ask yourself a few simple questions:
What is working really well right now?
What keeps causing frustration?
What are we doing mostly because I feel like we’re supposed to?
Is there one thing I could simplify?
You don’t need to hold a formal family meeting or rewrite your lesson plans. You’re simply looking for sources of friction while they are still small enough to fix easily.
Maybe the answer is changing nothing.
But perhaps you realize that nobody cares about the elaborate history notebook you’re spending hours preparing, or that the online class you thought would make life easier is actually creating more work. Those are useful things to discover in September rather than enduring them until May.
You Don’t Have to Reinvent Your Homeschool to Make It Better
Once the school year has started, it’s easy to feel like the plan is set.
But one of the best things about homeschooling is that you can make small adjustments along the way. You don’t need to scrap your schedule every time something is inconvenient, but you also don’t have to keep doing something for eight more months simply because you planned it that way in July.
Add something enjoyable to your mornings. Simplify unnecessary assignments. Fix the troublesome part of the day instead of the whole schedule. Give your children a little more independence. Find other homeschool families you enjoy being around.
Then keep paying attention.
A homeschool year that ends well usually isn’t one where everything went according to plan. It’s one where the family learned what worked, changed what didn’t, and kept making homeschooling fit the people actually living it.
