A few years later, when homeschooling had begun in earnest, Leila Lawler said that her homeschool was built on order and wonder. Again, just two words, but words that helds such promise and direction. Order would keep us moving forward with a semblance of calm and organization. But wonder would be there to wind around the sturdy scaffolding that order provided.

Our school would have an everyday rhythm, but space for celebration and rest as well. We would focus on building skills, but also make space for art + music + time outside.

And what about you? What do you want from your homeschool? What words might describe it?

What if you adopted reverence and gratitude, order and wonder till the end of the year?

What might change? What might become possible?

Often when we look at our homeschools and feel like something is not quite right, it can seem like we’re facing an insurmountable wall. There are way too many moving parts and none of them are working.

But what if instead of a giant, monolithic wall, we imagined a tangle of embroidery thread. It’s still a mess, but it’s a mess made up of individual threads. Threads that we may be able to pull apart and begin to unravel.

Our homeschools are complicated. But with a little strategic thinking, we can start to clear the snarls.

Let’s take the next few weeks to think about some of those individual threads–the schedules, the meal plans, the read alouds, the curriculum–and how we might begin bit by bit to bring a little order + wonder to each thread.

Just grab a piece of paper from your journal or notebook, set a timer for 10 minutes, and start listing the things that are on your mind:

• nagging chores
• difficult scheduling challenges
• overwhelming questions
• questions about a curriculum choice

Let the paper hold the emerging lists, and let your brain start to unravel the places where you are stuck.

Mystie Winckler has loads of information on brain dumps if you’d like a list of prompts to work through. Then as you read the posts in the coming weeks, you’ll already have a list of topics specific to your homeschool top of mind and you can try out ideas.

Maybe you’ve thought something like this…

• If I could find the right curriculum, then this child would finally learn to read (or spell or write a 5 paragraph essay).
• If we could stick to the schedule, we wouldn’t feel so harried.
• If we lived in a house with a bigger yard (or more bathrooms or a garage) then we could focus on school.

The problem of course is that each of these issues might be true. You might need to try another curriculum or build a more sustainable schedule. Homeschooling is a dynamic art, not an exact science. Each year, sometimes a couple of times a year, you’ll need to make adjustments to your plans. That’s because your homeschool is made up of people, people who are learning, growing images of God.

Our expectations get in the way because they can keep us from moving at all. If we don’t have wheat we need, then we won’t be successful. But really, the choices you make about curriculum or scheduling aren’t magical. They don’t have the power to make sure your days are smooth and easy.

Homeschooling is iterative. You don’t make decisions once and never revisit them. You take small steps and then maybe 6 weeks later, see how things are going. You can make adjustments and then keep moving forward.

What expectations might be holding you back?

How can you begin to lower your expectations and keep going?

What if homeschooling were more like a good walk that you take every day. Maybe around the block to greet the neighborhood cats, maybe down to the river to look at the boats, maybe out to the bluff to watch the moon rise.

Small, repeatable steps are the key to beating perfectionism, building consistency, and growing as a homeschooler.

Those expectations that we talked about are just perfectionism masquerading as an item on our to-do list. As long things aren’t perfect, then we can maybe be let off the hook. How can we really get down to homeschooling when our house is too small or our kids are too wiggly? We can mistake our longing for perfection for high standards. But instead of inspiring us, perfectionism binds us in fear. Small steps can loose the hold that perfection has on us. We don’t need to be perfect, we just need to take the next right step.

There are so many moving pieces to a homeschool day. My own list for this afternoon includes laundry, dinner, and a trip to the post office. And that list doesn’t even include any of our homeschool work! It’s hard to consistently keep all the balls up in the air. But I can consistently take small steps and see real progress.

When we are growing as homeschoolers, our direction matters more than our speed. We won’t necessarily see the fruit of our labor very soon. Though we can practice remembering what went right in our busy days.

What small step can you take toward peace in your homeschool day?

Now we are ready to think about what can get done in our homeschools. Not necessarily what the teacher’s guide claims can get done. But what this particular child with their own gifts and difficulties can handle on any given Tuesday morning.

When we plan in weeks we can create a little bit of margin. A day can go off the rails, but a week can become a reliable container. So begin to make a rough plan. I use a Weekly Docket (click File >> Make a Copy to edit the form for your family). I keep my Docket on a clipboard so I can keep track of outside appointments, our dinner menu, and what each child needs to be working on. How many times each week will we do math or history or reading practice? A simple check mark is enough for me to see at a glance subjects that might be falling through the cracks.

So make a weekly plan, and then…make it a little bit smaller. Opportunities ( and challenges!) will arise that we could not foresee. If the schedule is already full, we risk adding stress and bringing on overwhelm. Consider travel times as well as prep work and recovery. Giving yourself a bit of margin means that the unexpected doesn’t become an emergency.

In our homeschool we plan for 4 days of school each week. We use that free day to catch up on chores, work on projects, meet up with friends, or just rest. This week I had to catch up on laundry–people were out of clothes! Margin means we are never more than a couple of days away from a day when we can focus on getting back on track instead of relentlessly pushing forward.

Do you plan margin into your homeschool days?

Is there space in the schedule for reverence + gratitude, order + wonder?

But that’s not what consistency really is. Consistency isn’t performing perfectly or even pressuring everyone in your care to perform. Consistency is building a sustainable schedule and ways to return after you hit a bump in the road. It’s the return that creates consistency!

Because there are going to be bumps. A child will get sick, the baby will stop taking naps, your husband will face a hard season of unemployment. Bumps can also be really good things. Kids who are happily playing dress up all morning or the arrival of a new baby. These real conditions on the ground effect of ability to homeschool. And that’s as it should be. We are homeschooling–our home life is the center of all the learning that happens.

Consistent homeschoolers know that interruptions will happen. They have a way to return when life has pushed them off course. One path to return might be to only do Morning Time for a week, then add subjects back into the schedule a week at a time. The specifics will change depending on your family. Start smaller than you think you should and build from there.

At the beginning, when no one could read, we recited everything in a call and response fashion. I would read a line from a poem or prayer and the children would repeat it after me. Over time our selections have gotten longer and more complicated. But we still follow a simple, adaptable formula:

Prayer :: Hymn :: Scripture :: Poem

This structure can grow or contract based on the needs of your family. We change our selections seasonally through the year, usually changing the selections every 4-6 weeks. Now that we have all teens, we add in our history studies and Latin. Many families use the structure of Morning Time to do music or art history as well.

Here are two simple collections that we have used.

A Month of Morning Time

Tune My Heart

At our place we start with the ritual of Morning Time. Beginning here means that we begin our day together. We are recollected again, reminded of what’s most important. We start our learning day the way we mean to go on: encountering beauty first.

One of the secrets of Morning Time is picking selections that I like, ones I want to hear over time. Often by 9am when we gather to start school, there have already been conflicts. Morning Time gives us the chance to get quiet and tune our hearts to the grace of the moment

We aren’t aiming to memorize the selections. Just to be exposed to them over time. I love that image of exposure. Light sensitive paper can be exposed and a photograph develop. Good things come from simple, repeated exposure. Putting ourselves and our children in the way of beauty builds lasting connection and belonging between each member of the family and between what’s beautiful in this world.

Gretchen Rubin’s book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Everyday Life offers this list of traits:

• Are you an introvert or extrovert?
• Are you a lark or an owl?
• Do you crave a sense of simplicity or abundance?
• Do you thrive with familiarity or novelty?
• Are you a finisher or an opener?
• Are you a marathoner or sprinter?

Understanding these things about yourself is a straightforward way to begin to build a schedule that plays to your strengths. It can also help streamline curriculum choices. If you know you crave novelty, then a schedule with 6 weeks on and then a break can help you deal with the day to day grind. The simplicity of open-and-go curriculum might be a plus or you may prefer building your own curriculum from an abundant booklist. Knowing if you are a finisher or an opener can help you build systems to guide the challenging parts of the school year.

For the record, I am the first in each of the pairs! I’d love to hear your preferences.