YMB #131 Creating Consistency in Your Homeschool

Hey there and welcome to episode 131 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. So today we're gonna be talking about something that may not at first seem related to Morning Time in your homeschool, but really it is. So hear me out on this one. We're gonna be talking about how to create consistency in your homeschool and why this is important. So if you have followed me for very long,
you know that Morning Time is probably the number one thing I talk about online by about 51%. And then the other thing that I talk about a lot online is homeschool planning. So that is my other expertise, my other wheelhouse. And there is actually a third thing that I am kind of known for speaking about online, and that is homeschool consistency. We actually have a homeschool consistency course that we run that's a combo of a course and accountability.
It's not open right now, we've already done it for this year, but I will link to it in the show notes for this episode of the podcast if consistency is something you struggle with. I do have tips for you though. So we're gonna start out by just giving you some really great tips that you can use to help you if you struggle with consistency in your homeschool.
And we're also gonna talk about why is it important. I know if you're struggling with consistency, I know if getting up and doing homeschooling day after day after day is something that you don't do, you are probably beating yourself up quite a bit for this. And you probably also think you're alone. Like there are not a lot of other people out there who are being inconsistent and that actually is not true.
There are a lot of people out there who are struggling with consistency in their homeschool, but it's not something that we talk about. I actually had a lady approach me at a homeschool convention once and she was just in tears and she said, thank you so much for talking about the struggle with consistency in homeschooling because I thought I was the only one.
I thought I was the only person who ever struggled with this. And it made me feel so ashamed and so alone. And you're not, if you are struggling with consistency in your homeschool, you are not the only one. There's no need to feel ashamed, and there's no need to feel alone. And it might actually help to reach out to somebody and say, “Hey, do you ever have a hard time just getting started with your homeschool day?” And maybe that would open the conversation and other people would, would be willing to talk about their struggles as well.
So about seven years ago, I really did struggle with getting my homeschool day off to a good start. And I think this is why consistency and Morning Time can go hand in hand is because Morning Time is a way to start your school day.
Now let's talk about that a little bit later. But first, let's focus in on, now we know that consistency is a fairly widespread problem in the homeschool community. Let's talk about why it's important to actually be consistent. Because some of you might be saying, “Well, Pam, come on, homeschooling gives you the ultimate in freedom and flexibility. Why do we even need to worry about being consistent?”
And I would tell you, if you're struggling in your homeschool, there is a very good chance that consistency would help solve some of the problems that you're having. Consistency lends itself to doing some wonderful things to fix homeschool problems. So let's talk about the first reason why we wanna be consistent in our homeschool, and that is because it builds trust with our kids.
The way we build trust with our children is by being consistent. Now we may think, oh boy, our kids just wanna go off and do their own thing. And you know what? That's absolutely true. They do wanna do their own thing. There aren't a lot of kids who wanna do school. But the fact of the matter is, is we are called to give our kids a good education.
And the way we get them on board with showing up every day and doing the work with a better attitude is by being consistent and building trust with them. So the more we do what we say we're going to do, the more we start school at the time that we say we're going to start school, the more we show up and do it day after day after day, the more they get used to what is expected of them. The more they can trust what you're wanting them to do. And then the more they show up and do it without complaint or with fewer complaint, they don't always do it completely without complaint, but they complain less.
So a few years ago we were running our consistency program and we ended it right before I went on the road to start speaking. And so I show up for my first speaking event and this lady comes into the booth and she says, “Oh Pam, I have to tell you something so funny.” She had just finished our consistency course and the day before she was coming to the homeschool convention and she said, I forgot to tell my kids that I was actually gonna get up the next day and travel to the homeschool convention.
So they didn't know mom was getting up and leaving. She totally forgot to tell 'em that that was her travel day. They knew she was going to the convention, they just didn't realize she was traveling that day. So she actually had three teenagers. They, you know, the youngest was 12, the oldest was 17 and there was one in the middle.
And they had been being super consistent. They had been starting their school day every morning at eight o'clock in the living room. And she said she was laying in bed thinking about all the things she had to do to get in the car and get out the road for traveling that day. And she heard the doors start opening and closing at eight o'clock and the kids padding down the hall and going into the living room to sit down to start their Morning Time.
And she was like, oh, I totally forgot to tell the kids we weren't doing school today and that this was a planned day off. And so they all showed up at 8:00 AM ready to do school without any prodding from her, without her having to go get them or to tell them or anything else. And that was the fruit of the six weeks of consistency.
And so then she got to go in and give them a little nice surprise that it was a planned day off. And so this is important. You're building trust with your kids, but it's also important to note that planned days off are okay. I'm not talking about not having planned days off in your homeschool. I'm talking about doing school on the days that you plan.
Because I will tell you your consistency problems in your homeschool do not come from having too many planned days off. Consistency problems in your homeschool come from taking days off that you did not plan. So let's stop doing that and start building trust with our kids and then their attitudes are better. They show up better. A lot of times when mom say to me, “Hey, my kid just has a horrible attitude. He doesn't wanna do school, he's pushing back, he's fighting me on it left and right.” This could be a girl as well, not just boys do this. So she's pushing me, she's fighting back about doing school. My very first question is, how consistent are you being with your schooling? Because if kids are not sure if they're going to do school each day, if they can simply ask and get out of doing it, then that's the path they're going to take. You get the rare, occasional really motivated kid who wants to do school, but for the most part, kids are very happy to follow their own agenda and not yours for the day. And so if they know they can get away with it, if they know with a little bit of pushback and with a little bit of attitude, eh, maybe I can like talk her into not doing school today or force the issue with my horrible attitude, then they're gonna take advantage of that a lot of times and be very, happy just to give you a hard time and not do school. So the more you establish the fact that school happens every single day unless we've planned to take a day off, then the more they're going to show up and be ready and willing to do school. Now it does take some time, it does take some time. So we're building trust, we're building these good habits that cause our kids to give us fewer bad attitudes about doing school. And then the next thing is we're really then able to evaluate what goes wrong and right in our homeschool.
So a lot of times moms will be ready to like switch curriculum in November, like they're, “Oh, this math curriculum isn't working, it's causing tears.” That could be a legitimate issue. But if you have only very sporadically done math using that curriculum, how can you be sure that it works at all?
In order to be able to evaluate whether or not something is working in our homeschool, we have to have done it enough and done it consistently enough to make that evaluation. And so if we're not doing it enough and we're, if we're not doing it consistently enough, then we really can't make a very good evaluation and we end up just switching curriculum willy-nilly trying to solve the problem by buying something new when the problem is not that the curriculum is broken, the problem is that we're not using it enough. We're not using it effectively by being consistent in our homeschool.
So there you go. Three reasons why consistency is important. Are you tired of having to come up with Morning Time resources by yourself? Are you spending too much time Googling and on Pinterest to find poetry, art, and music to incorporate into your homeschool day?
There is an easier way. Introducing Your Morning Basket Plus the done-for-you solution for moms who want to start their homeschool days with delight. Included in your membership is access to over 50 sets of Morning Time plans plus all the new ones we release live events, a community of like-minded homeschoolers and so much more. Join us pambarnhill.com or the link of the show notes and start creating a Morning Time you love today.
So let me tie homeschool consistency now to the idea of Morning Time or a Morning Basket. And what I will say to you is that so often consistency issues in our homeschool stem from the fact that our mornings get off to a very bad start. I won't say this is 100% the reason why we have consistency issues in the homeschool. I mean, things come in like honoring your school day.
You know, am I really setting aside time to do school and honoring that, not letting outside obligations encroach on this commitment that you have made to homeschool your children. There are other things, but a large number of times simply fixing your mornings can take you a long way towards helping you to be more consistent in your homeschool. So how do we go about fixing our mornings so that we can be more consistent?
And starting your day with a Morning Basket is one way to do this. Starting your day when a with a time when everyone is coming together, everyone is learning together and also everyone is enjoying what you're doing for the most part, then it makes it just more delightful to start your day. So starting your day with a little bit of joy by using a Morning Basket.
Now if you have older kids, if you've never done a Morning Basket before, I'm going to send you back a couple of podcasts because this is not magic pixie dust, right? You can't just say, oh, I'm gonna start a Morning Basket. It's gonna fix all of our morning problems in our homeschool, especially if you have older kids who have never done a Morning Basket before.
So you're going to have to build into this, you're going to have to start small, build slow, and and really build up that Morning Basket muscle before it can start helping you. So I would refer you back to episode 129, which is five tips for starting a Morning Time. So it's not going to magically fix the issue, but if you have been kind of hit or miss with the Morning Time before and you know it's something that your kids actually enjoy, it can be a gateway to homeschool consistency for you. If you say to yourself, you know what, we are just not going to miss doing our Morning Time. So every day we're gonna get up and we're gonna make it a priority that Morning Time is what we're going to do. We're going to get our Morning Basket done and we're not going to miss this.
Especially if your kids are little. If you're struggling with consistency and your oldest is about eight or nine, everybody else is younger than that, then don't try to fix your entire school day all at once. Don't think about, oh, I have to be consistent doing a four hour school day every single day because just a quick note here, perfectionism is the other big thing.
Mornings and perfectionism, that's another big thing right there that keeps moms from being consistent in their school day. So don't think I'm going to fix the entire day. What I want you to do instead is think I'm going to build a consistent Morning Time habit with my kids and that's it. 45 minutes, an hour. But we are gonna work on that and we are going to work on. No matter what happens in the rest of our day, we are going to get super consistent about doing this Morning Basket or doing this Morning Time.
Now here's what you're going to find happens. Number one, I've already talked about the fact that Morning Time is just a huge win for your homeschool day. So if you go back and listen to episode 128 where I talk about why do Morning Time, that's one of the reasons, it is a time where you can get marked off so many different subjects in your homeschool and feel like you have accomplished so much. So by doing a Morning Time and by committing to just being consistent with a Morning Time, you can already mark off a number of different subjects with all of your children. So you're going to feel super successful.
This is kind of like the idea of making your bed. And I know that there are people out there who are not bed makers, but I tell you what, if you are looking for a quick win when it comes to keeping your house clean, nothing can be faster and easier than making your bed each day. You just feel so accomplished every time you walk back into that bedroom like, “Hey, I've done something.” I know it's really weirdly weird, but that's just the way things are. And if, if you're not a bedmaker, like try it. Try it for a week, just make your bed. And it doesn't have to be like, all I do is pull the covers up y'all and throw a few pillows on top.
My husband says way too many pillows. But it makes me feel good every time I walk in my bedroom because my bed is made. The same thing with Morning Time. You're getting that huge win at the first part of your day and you are just going to feel good even if you don't get to anything else for the rest of your school day.
Now, here's what's actually going to happen though. You're like, ah, Pam, but we gotta do math and we've gotta do reading. You do. And doing that Morning Time most days will actually help you ease on into doing the rest of the subjects. So while I'm saying to you, commit to just doing the Morning Basket, commit to just doing the Morning Time, hold yourself to that level of commitment, what's going to happen is most of the days you're going to get started during the Morning Time, you're going to get finished. Don't take a break. Try not to have a break, maybe a cleanup song and that's it in between your Morning Time and the rest of your subjects. And then, then you can roll on into doing the other subjects.
And the more you do this, the more you're going to find that it is easier to roll into doing the other subjects, a little bit of math, a little bit of phonics, a little bit of handwriting. If your kids are age 10 or older, a little bit of composition. And so you're going to roll on over into the rest of those subjects more times than you don't.
So if you've been doing this for two or three weeks and you're starting to consistently roll into doing the independent subjects after the Morning Basket and you wake up one day and all you get done is the Morning Basket, don't beat yourself up. You've still gotten so much done. And Morning Baskets are a fabulous tool because a really rich Morning Basket full of great picture books about history, about science really can be a large part of school for any child who is eight and under. So a rich Morning Basket full of those kinds of picture books and good conversations and art and music and current events and just wonderful things that are going on in the world around us. Maybe a little bit of nature study, do that plus a few minutes of handwriting, a few minutes of phonics, and a few minutes of math each day. And it's easy to have a good school day that is a great full school day for any child who is about eight years old or under. So Morning Basket, that can be your big chunk, that can be your big win for the day. And by setting itself up where you're doing that first, you're doing that consistently, then you can check that off and feel good. And I think most of the time you're going to roll on over into doing some of the other subjects as well.
So that's where I think Morning Basket fits in. And you know, when we are thinking about, you know, we talk about productivity and eating frogs. Productivity gurus will tell you, well, you need to eat your frog first. You need to do your hardest thing first in the morning. And when you're a mom who has a lot of little kids, maybe the baby kept you up all night. Maybe all of a sudden the 13-month-old has decided they're not sleeping all the way through the night. Maybe the only time you have a few minutes to yourself is after everyone goes to bed and you just, it's so quiet and you just hate to go to sleep and you're enjoying watching something on television without anyone clawing all over you. And then the toddler's up at 5:30 in the morning and you've had so little sleep and now you have to do this school day. That's hard. That is so hard.
But when you start the school day with something delightful like reading aloud, that just allows your brain to wake up a little bit, my friend Jessica Waldock talks so much about not being a morning person and using Morning Time as a way to just allow her brain to wake up slowly. But when you start with something delightful as opposed to trying to start with a math lesson that may or may not cause tears or a reading lesson that, God bless them, is just going to bore you out of your mind, you know, that's hard. And so starting the day with something delightful instead just might make it easier to start.
So these are some ways, some reasons why a Morning Basket could be a great way to help you build that consistency muscle that is so important in your homeschool. You know, I talk to moms all the time and they have all of these questions about which curriculum is the right one, which curriculum should I be using with my kid, which curriculum is gonna help us learn the best and help them go the furthest and succeed the most? Or I'm so confused about all these homeschool methods. Should I be a classical homeschooler? Should I be a Charlotte Mason homeschooler? Should I be a unit-study homeschooler? I mean, which one is right and which one is wrong?
And I would tell you the answer to both of those questions is you're asking the wrong question. The most important thing you can do in your homeschool is to get super consistent with whatever it is you're doing. Choose a math curriculum that you like and just do it consistently. Choose a style of homeschooling that seems to resonate with you and just follow it consistently.
Consistency is the most important part, and a Morning Basket is one of those ways that you can be more consistent in your homeschool. So if you have struggled with this, if this is a struggle that you have, you can come on over to our community. There are a lot of moms in there, it's community.pambarnhill.com. There’s a lot of moms in there who are either currently struggling with consistency or have struggled with consistency in the past, and we've helped them with one of our programs. So it is a very safe space to talk about your consistency issues. It's also a wonderful place to talk to moms about Morning Time. We have so many homeschoolers in there doing Morning Time and chatting about it. So we would love to have you join us and feel secure that you can talk about any issues that you're having over there.
So just an invitation to you. Thanks so much for listening to your Morning Basket. If you are ready to spend less time planning and more time engaged in learning with your children, join Your Morning Basket Plus a monthly membership with everything you need to start a Morning Time practice in your homeschool. To join, head on over to ymbplus.com and I'll see you there.