So many new homeschoolers think the answer to their homeschool problems is finding the best method or the perfect curriculum. I’m here today to tell you that neither of those are the answer — there is something else that will make your homeschool more effective and easier to do.
Instead, an effective homeschool comes from choosing what you want your homeschool to include and then being consistent. Choose the curriculum you think will work. Make your best choice about what method you most align with (or better yet ditch the methods all together and write your own educational vision instead). Then when those two things are done, your job is to simply show up each day and do the work. Sadly, it’s not glamorous and it doesn’t come wrapped in shiny shrink wrap. It doesn’t smell like new books, but it is the thing that will help you have the homeschool you have been dreaming about.
Why consistency is so important for your homeschool?
The thing is the more consistent you are in your homeschooling the easier it gets. Consistency makes it easier to see where you need to tweak things (you can only know what’s not working when you have done it enough to make a good evaluation). More importantly, consistency teaches your kids what to expect. When they know they are going to get up and do school each day, they simply start doing it with much less (notice I didn’t say zero) push back.
Consistency is difficult, though. It is one of the hardest things you will do in your homeschool and honestly, you are probably doing some things that might be sabotaging your efforts to be consistent. We want to discover those places where we are hurting ourselves and see if we can make some adjustments to increase the ease in which we homeschool.
So let’s talk about why some moms (me in the past, and maybe even you too) struggle with being consistent in homeschooling. The reason is not because those moms are lazy or don’t care if their kids are educated. I find the number one reason that moms struggle with consistency is because of perfectionism!
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How perfectionism stops your homeschool day
Imagine this. It is 11:00 and you look up from what you are doing. Maybe you were paying bills, or cleaning out a closet. You really didn’t mean to start either project but you just got sucked into it. Or maybe you are scrolling on social media and the time just got away from you. Whatever the cause it is now 11 and you look around — the kids are off somewhere playing or reading, tucked away with Legos or on the trampoline. The breakfast dishes are still on the counter, you know people will be wanting lunch soon and you have to be out the door to go to piano lessons at 1:45.
There is no way you will be able to clean up, fix lunch, get your entire school day in and still have people with clothes and shoes on, buckled in and ready to leave in time. It just won’t happen. Since you can’t do the perfect homeschool day you planned in your head, you default to doing nothing at all. Oh well. I’ll try again tomorrow.
The reality is that tomorrow might be a good day, but these distracted days (some with very valid and important distractions) pop up more than you would like to admit. Before you know it, your homeschool attendance tracking sheet starts to look more like morse code than solid blocks of getting days done.
Your homeschool suffers because of it. We can’t control the bad days, but we have a lot of control over what normal looks like in our homeschool — and if these distracted days have become the normal then we are going to struggle.
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You must let go of perfectionist thinking to make progress in your homeschool
So how do we fix this? Well there are a few mindset shifts that need to take place to help us reframe how we view our homeschool days. One very important shift is to let go of the idea that the only good school day is one that can be executed perfectly. That kind of thinking is going to derail your homeschool often and keep you from getting the consistency you desire – the consistency that is going to change the entire attitude of your homeschool.
I’ll be back again next week to talk about the second thing you may be doing that is sabotaging your homeschool consistency. I hope you join me then.
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