Simple Tips for Starting New Homeschool Routines

Pam Barnhill [00:00:01]:
Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again? Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids? Welcome to Homeschool Better Together. A podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family. I’m Pam Barnhill, and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and into the wonder. Let’s do this. Oh, my goodness. I tell you that starting a new homeschool year can feel just a bit like a roller coaster ride. There are all these ups and downs, but with the right tricks and tips, you can make the transition smoother smoother. I’m not gonna promise you smooth and, maybe just a little bit more enjoyable.

Pam Barnhill [00:00:50]:
I mean, it’s challenging, but with the right strategies, it can become a seamless part of your homeschool journey, this transition into the new year. And in this episode, we’re gonna be talking about starting small, using reminders, and also my secret trick for getting ahead on my school day. So when I think back to all of the years, kind of the collective memory that I have of starting school, most definitely the number one word that comes to mind is exhaustion. Like just being so absolutely tired at the end of the 1st week or the end of the 1st couple of weeks of going back to school. And so that’s something I always plan for now is I always plan for like not to have a lot of other stuff going on because I know that I’m going to be tired. The other thing that I always think about when I think about going back to school is that roller coaster like I mentioned before. And the reason it’s a roller coaster is there’s this weird juxtaposition between, oh my gosh, we’re so excited to be back to school. Like it’s a totally new year.

Pam Barnhill [00:01:56]:
We’ve got all these new things to study. It’s fabulous. And, oh my gosh, we’ve got to go back to school, like pulling teeth and getting people to fall into their routines and start doing everything that it is that you want them to do after a summer of maybe too many screens or just spending your days at the pool, you know, or stuff like that. I’m sure that my house is not the only place that this happens. And as the kids have gotten older, we’ve had way less of that, oh, back to school honeymoon excitement and way more of the, oh my goodness. I’m dragging my feet. I really don’t want to start. So, you know, it happens.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:38]:
That’s what back to school is like. And I think recognizing that there will be the highs and lows with back to school, there will be these moments of like honeymoon. Everyone’s so excited. Let’s start all the new stuff. And up against that, there will be other moments of what do you mean that I can’t just stop in 10 o’clock in the morning and watch something on TV or head out to the pool with my friends or whatever, knowing and recognizing that those things are going to happen and that you’re gonna have both is kind of like half of the battle. It’s this acknowledgement that this is kind of what we’re up against and it’s all perfectly normal because I think where we go wrong is when we get inside our head that it’s supposed to look a certain way. And when it doesn’t match that all the time, we start thinking that we’ve done something wrong or there’s something wrong with the whole process. And note the ups and downs, that’s completely and totally normal.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:36]:
So what are some things that we can do to help with this whole getting into a new routine process that comes along with the idea of going back to homeschooling. And the first thing I would say is we start by starting small. I’m a big advocate of starting small. This is something that, you know, you wanna do no matter what you’re trying to do, But big changes can be really overwhelming. Trying to change everything at once can be overwhelming. And so ease into those new routines with some gradual changes. So typically the 1st week of school at our house, we start with 1, maybe 2 things. And then depending on how quickly I want to ramp up into my school year, we begin adding other things to it.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:26]:
So I have done where we started with like almost half of our load and a couple of days later added a little more and then added a little more. That’s if I want to go fast, if I’m perfectly content with going slower to start my school year. And that just depends on a variety of factors, you know, like what the rest of our school year is going to look like, how many breaks I’m kind of planning on taking and that stuff. You know, if I want to be done by a certain date, if I’m going slower though, I just really start with one thing. And so this year we started with tutoring. So any tutoring that anyone had to do, we started with that. And then we moved into adding some morning time on to our routine. And then a few days later, we started adding in some of the other subjects.

Pam Barnhill [00:05:11]:
And by the end of week 3, we were pretty much up to full speed with what it was that we were going to do for our school year. And I’m perfectly content with that. I’m perfectly happy with that. And some people are like, Oh, how do you count those half days of school? We just count them as school. We just 100% count them as school and we don’t lose a whole lot of sleep over it because there are a lot of days where regular schools do this kind of half day routine, or they’re called out of class for other things. And I’m just not going to sit and worry about the fact that we were kind of doing a half day of school. So definitely start small and you can also do this with things like waking up early. I mean, one of the things we do before the school year begins is we start having everybody readjust their sleep schedule.

Pam Barnhill [00:05:58]:
So in the summer, maybe they’ve been staying up a little later. Remember I have teenagers y’all, but I know this happens with younger kids too. It’s light outside much later. You’re in the pool. You’re playing outside because the weather is just so lovely. And then you’ve got to switch back into a more traditional kind of schedule and having everybody adjust their sleep schedule just a little bit at a time and giving a few weeks to do that, as opposed to one Sunday night saying, oh, by the way, everybody’s gotta be up by 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. That’s definitely not something that would work here. So we we ease into all of those different kinds of changes as well.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:36]:
So the next thing you could do to ease yourself into the school year, and this is one I have done so many times is using some kind of reminder. Now this can be a reminder like of your phone. You can set reminders on your phone. I love using Siri on my phone to set reminders for different things. I’m constantly like holding it up and saying, Hey, remind me of this, or Hey, remind me of that. Also using alarms. So setting particular alarms to remind me to do things. Sometimes that’s really, really helpful.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:09]:
And then sticky note reminders. If you need a visual reminder, like I have one right here that says, don’t forget to take the thumbnail picture because I would finish a YouTube video and run off to do something else and forget to take a picture for the thumbnail. So just little sticky note reminders all around your house about various routines and things that you wanna do can be super, super helpful. But if you’re struggling with remembering to do things, setting those reminders are going to help you do it. And so like, you know, what time do you wanna transition from kind of the breakfast chaos and be into starting that school day? So set a timer for that, set a little alarm on your phone. And a lot of times the phones will allow you to name the alarm certain names. And so it could be our start school alarm and back off of that a little bit and give yourself a 10 minute or a 15 minute reminder. If you need it, that, Hey, this is something we’re going to do like 15 minutes from now, we’re going to start school.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:09]:
So it doesn’t take anybody by surprise. And if you have some of those devices in your home that you can talk to, and we’ll talk back to you, You can even set reminders on those as well. So it can make an announcement in the morning and say, Hey, you know, like now is the time to get ready to start school and it can announce it to everyone, not just mom. So everyone hears that. So definitely use either visual reminders or phone reminders of things that you want to do. And little sticky note schedules for everyone are perfect for the 1st few weeks of school because you can kind of move things around and shuffle the order of things. And so write out everyone’s routine on a sticky note until or on multiple sticky notes until you can kind of figure out what’s a good order for everything and stick them up on the whiteboard and move them around as you need to, and voila, instant visual reminder of all the things that you want to do. Okay.

Pam Barnhill [00:09:09]:
My final tip, and this is perhaps one of the ones that has completely saved my bacon through the years. So one of my best tips, and it’s so simple. You may have already thought of it yourself and it is prepare as much as you can the night before. I can remember back when I had 3 little kids and they were like 864 And we were trying to get up and get our school day started. And there were so many different barriers to starting that school day. So many things that I felt like needed to happen before we could just get to the table and get started. And so I began like preparing as much as I could in advance. And so this was things like taking my shower at night so I didn’t have to get up and do it in the morning because y’all back when my kids were little, I was not a morning person at all.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:03]:
I wanted to wake up like 5 minutes before they got up. I wanted to sleep as late as possible because I had some really early risers. I had one kid who the earlier I woke up, the earlier he woke up and he was definitely trying to beat me out the door. So like trying to wake up before the kids was such a struggle for me when they were younger. Now I have no problem doing it, but back then it was definitely an issue. And so I would take my shower the night before I would lay out my clothes the night before I would go into the kitchen and like sit the cereal or the oatmeal or whatever on the table and just make the decision. This is what I’m going to cook for breakfast tomorrow morning. Same thing with dinner.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:49]:
This was so helpful. Like if I was wanting to put something in the crock pot or something like that, because I was thinking about it the day before, I could lay things out and start thawing things. And I would never be staring at like this frozen lump of chicken in the morning saying, okay, how am I supposed to stick this in the crock pot before I leave for co op or whatever? And so I would think about all those things the night before. And I had myself like a little station. I had some little index cards, and I had a couple of pens in there and my phone so I could check, like, what the weather was for the next day and what my schedule was for the next day. And I would just kinda stand there at the counter and make myself a little index card note of, like, the top three things I needed to do the next day. And also, like, what was I gonna cook? And this was such a huge thing for me. If there was a point in time in the day that we had to be out the door, I would kind of do the math and work my way backwards and say things like, okay, if we’re going to be out the door at 1 o’clock to go to music lessons, I have to start my homeschool day by 10 am in order to get the day in.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:57]:
Or if we’re gonna leave here at 2 o’clock to go to gymnastics, I have to start my homeschool day by 11 AM to be finished and out the door in time to get to gymnastics. And just having that time and knowing what it was, that kind of drop dead time that I had to start my school day was so huge for me in getting back in to that routine each and every year. And so just writing extra things down. So I didn’t have to think about them was so, so helpful. And so I’d stand there at the end of the day and I would write all of this stuff down and then I would go and just prepare the 2 or 3 things that I needed to do. And yes, I was absolutely exhausted. Yes. There was nothing I really wanted to do more than sit down somewhere and kick up my feet and not have to do anything else.

Pam Barnhill [00:12:50]:
But I was doing such a huge favor for my future self. I was treating her really, really well. I mean, I really do believe this is almost like a kind of self care where you’re treating your future self with compassion and love by doing some things for her in advance. And so that was the thing that would always help me get back into a routine would be when I took the time to practice some compassion for my future self and do some things for her ahead of time. So just to, you know, just to make her life easier. It, it really was, something that was good for me. And so getting that breakfast made and in all of that stuff, not really made, but getting it laid out, you know, and making that decision about what are we going to eat? That was the thing that really, really helped me. So if any of these tips have been helpful for you, I would love to hear about it.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:49]:
And also if you are looking for more tips like this, we would love to have you come and join us in our community. It’s absolutely free. It’s a fabulous place for homeschooling parents online. It’s free of a lot of the drama that’s on social media platforms, especially right now. So we would love to have you come over and join us. And you can find more information about that at pambarnhill.com/freecommunity, all one word, and we’ll drop the link for you so you can easily find that. And we’d love to have you join us. And, hey, if there were any tips here that you found really helpful for you, share this with other homeschooling families because we would love to help as many families as we can have a great new school year and get back in to those routines.

Pam Barnhill [00:14:40]:
Have a good one. That’s our show for today. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review so you never miss out on the wonder of homeschooling better together. To stay connected and learn even more about the homeschooling better together resources and to join our free community, visit hsbtpodcast.com. Until next week, keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.