Is homeschooling hard?
I’m not going to lie … it is hard. And anyone who tells you differently isn’t telling the truth.
It’s also wonderful, glorious, delightful and exciting.
But I think we do a disservice to anyone who is learning about homeschooling to not tell the entire truth about homeschooling.
Because if you’re trying to decide about homeschooling …
If you’re trying to decide if homeschooling will be worth it -- what the benefits are ...
And you’re trying to figure out what the advantages and disadvantages of homeschooling are -- you need someone to tell you both the good and the bad.
After 16 years homeschooling, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what I think makes homeschooling easier than public school AND what makes it harder.
I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to decide why I kept going -- even when there were tears (theirs and mine!), even when I was exhausted, and even when I thought I was absolutely failing.
And the reality is that sometimes it was because I’m stubborn.
But most of the time, it was because I could see the long view -- my children were actually growing up to be wonderful people. They were learning and “becoming.”
And I wanted to be part of the journey. Even if that meant I had to keep doing the “hard.”
In today’s video, I’m covering four hard truths I’ve learned about homeschooling during the past 16 years.
Because no matter where you are in the journey -- starting out or quite a ways down the dusty path -- just being aware of what makes homeschooling “hard” can also make it easier!
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
Transcript
Hello. My name's ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about four tricky truths that make it tough to be a homeschool mom. Most of the time I make videos that talk about how to be a successful homeschool mom, how to be a confident homeschool mom. But today I want to talk about why being a homeschool mom can be hard. And because I don't want to lie, homeschooling, it's hard.
It is not for the faint of heart. It is not easy. And so I want to talk about what makes it hard for the homeschool mom. Why is it that maybe you want to be aware of just some of the things that are coming that might be difficult that, don't get me wrong, I love homeschooling. I've been doing this for a really long time. I am a veteran homeschool mom of 16 years. I've got four kids. This isn't, I've been doing this awhile and these are the things that I find are still, even after 16 years, still hard for me.
So the first one, the first thing that's hard is you just never have it all figured out. You think you will. You think that it's 16 years or 18 years or 20 years, at some point, you're going to have it all figured out. But the reality is I am still researching. I am still asking questions. I'm still looking for answers. My kids get older and new questions develop, we enter a new phase of life and suddenly everything that I thought I knew has to change. It's just the reality of changing and growing.
You never have it all figured out, and that can be hard. Because you invest all this time, you think at some point, kind of just want to take a break and, and enjoy what I figured out. But the reality is there's always more to learn. There's always ways to improve. There's always things that, big questions that you're trying to figure out. So that's the first thing that I think is hard as being a homeschool mom, and it is a truth. You are never going to have it figured out.
So the second truth, the second tricky truth is that you never stop worrying. You just don't. You're gonna worry the entire time you're homeschooling. I've actually made another post that I recommend you watch all about why a little bit of worry is actually good. And you don't ever want to completely let go of the worry. But the truth is you are never going to stop worrying. And that can be frustrating.
Guilt and fear they sit on the homeschool mom's shoulders and it takes a lot of work to make them not screaming in your ears. And the guilt is all about what you've done in the past and regret and feeling like you should have done something different.
And the fear is all about the future. And it's all about what's going to happen and what am I doing to my kids and are they going to be okay? It's all the future. And these two are sitting on your shoulders and you're just like "Ahhhhhh".
So you gotta learn how to turn that off. But you don't want to completely turn off the worry because you do need it. So there's this battle in-between all of that. And me? Yeah, I'm still worrying. I'm still worrying after 16 years about math. I'm still worrying about am I using my time correctly with my different kids.
You know, am I figuring out, like should we be going on these field trips? Should we be staying home? Should we be, you know, am I doing enough? Am I not doing enough? I'm always trying to figure that out and there is some worry that I'm going to make the wrong choice. It just is.
Okay. So the third tricky truth, the third tricky truth is that it's harder to say goodbye. I didn't even know this. I read everything about how it brought families together and homeschooling creates this environment where everybody is genuinely good friends and that stuff is all true. It's awesome and amazing.
But I didn't realize that what that means is that when it's time to let someone go, either just short term because they're going into an activity you're not involved with like a play or something or long term. Like I sent my daughter off to college, it was hard. It was way harder than I thought it was going to be and it was compounded by the fact that we'd always been together. We'd always been a family, so that was hard.
The last thing, that's the tricky truth, the last tricky truth is that homeschooling is a huge sacrifice. Huge. It is a sacrifice of time. It is a sacrifice of money. It is a sacrifice of energy. All of it is a sacrifice. And you're going to have to come to grips with that. If you're going to be okay with homeschooling. It is a tricky truth that you are going to be sacrificing. Now, don't get me wrong, it is worth it. All of these tricky truths, all of these things, it is worth it. I love homeschooling.
If you need more help with your homeschooling, I do have a homeschool help center full of free resources that you can check out the links up above, down, below, wherever you're watching this video. I hope that that will help you if you are in the process of trying to decide if these tricky truths, if you're willing to embrace them so you can homeschool, or if you're in a place where you just need some help. I'm ToriAnn Perkey, and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
When I was a new homeschool mom, creating a homeschool schedule and a homeschool routine felt a little overwhelming.
What subjects should I include?
How much could I actually accomplish?
What if I missed something, and my kids had huge holes in their education?
So I created massive color-coded homeschool schedules. I broke the day into time slots. And I plugged in math, science, spelling, history, PE, foreign language, spiritual study, reading, character development … and so much more.
I was ready. My homeschool schedule and routine was perfect. What could go wrong?
It lasted 2 weeks.
During those two weeks there were so many tears -- both from me and my kids. It was not pretty.
I had made the classic homeschool mistake of trying to overschedule and do too much.
I had made the newbie mistake of trying to make my homeschool look like a public school.
I had made the understandable mistake of wanting to make sure I covered “everything.”
And the result was a homeschool that was completely unrealistic and fell apart almost immediately.
So I went back to the drawing board. I took time to research homeschool routines and schedules. What did successful ones REALLY look like?
And what I discovered is that a homeschool schedule is built to serve a successful homeschool routine.
Let’s dig in and talk about all three of those.
ALSO -- In this video I share one of the best ways to set up your homeschool so you can be confident and successful with my Confident Homeschool Foundations Program.
Use the coupon code “Routine” to get over 50% off the regular price!
In this video, I also mention several other posts and videos that I’ve made that can be helpful when putting together a successful homeschool routine that you may find helpful.
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
Check out the
For a limited time, get 50% off with the coupon code "ROUTINE"
Transcript
Hello. My name's ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about three easy mistakes to avoid when you're putting together your homeschool routine.
So routine rhythm, it's really, really important in a homeschool that you have some kind of routine patterns that you follow in your day, in your week, your month, and your year. This is how you show up as a consistent homeschool mom. This is how you are successfully accomplishing all the things that you want to accomplish is by creating routines.
But there are some easy, easy, easy mistakes that you can make that I can help you avoid if we go through this video together. So let's just dive right in because if you want your homeschool days to be successful, you're going to need routines that work and we want to help you avoid the mistakes that would make them not work. Okay?
Number one, what is the first of these three routines? You know, mistakes. What's the first one? Well, number one is expecting to fit in too much. It is so easy to put in so much in our homeschool. Language arts, math, science, history, foreign language, character development, PE, music, art, and that's just the categories, some of the categories. Technology, you know, coding, all of those things.
And then within that language arts, you want to do literature, you want to do grammar, you want to do writing, you want to make sure that they are doing punctuation. That can grow and then the math can grow and then the science can grow. And before you know it you have so much going on. Less is more, I promise.
It looks like you have to do so much in order to successfully confidently homeschool your kids. But the reality is you don't, you can do a lot less and have more success. A few things done very, very well work much better than a lot of things crammed in. So first mistake when setting up your routine is trying to have so much in it that it isn't possible to accomplish at all.
The second mistake that can happen so easily is expecting that every day will go perfectly. That every day you're going to plan the routine, you're going to know what you're going to do. It's all going to happen. It's all going to play out. No, no. Homeschool days are rarely predictable. There are always things. You're talking about a bunch of human beings all in one space, bumping into each other and doing all this stuff.
There are no perfect homeschool days. There are great homeschool days, and I've made videos about how to have good homeschool days and how to avoid bad homeschools days and how to turn bad days into good days, but there are no perfect days.
And so when you're setting up your routine, you want to set up your routine in a way that embraces the fact that you're going to have different kinds of days. And if you can do that, then you're going to be able to successfully move into a routine that actually works.
Now, the third mistake that's so easy to make is expecting that a routine once working is going to stay the same. Oh, how I wish it was true, how I wish that the perfect routine. You know, I think you could have really good routines. And I would build routines that would be working really, really, really well, and then everything would fall apart.
And what I started to notice that no matter what my routine was every four to six months, depending on how we were homeschooling, I would have to revisit the routine and sometimes completely start over. Sometimes I just would have to tweak it, but no routine lasts forever because the people who are using the routine don't stay the same. They change.
Your kids get older, your kids get bigger, they need different things, they have different ideas, they're doing different curriculum or they're doing different activities. Things change. The routine has to change. So an easy mistake is to think that once you've found it or that if you can find the right routine, it will suddenly work forever. It just doesn't work. The healthy way to look at routines is to consider what does work in your family. To embrace the change, to be open to the fact that things are going to look different, different days.
To learn about what do typical days look like and you know, how do I change good days to a bad day or bad days to good days? How do I have good days? And I've made videos on all of those. I'm gonna include links on my blog. So if you're watching this video somewhere else, head over to the blog so you can see the links of all these other videos. I've talked about how we do this so that routines are successful.
The other thing I want to recommend is I actually have a course that's all about this. It's all about setting up a successful homeschool, taking into account you and your children and all these other things so that you can create routines that will work. That will work for your family, that are individualized based on the knowledge and the principles culled from so many different areas. So I would strongly recommend that if you are struggling to build good routines or you want to build good routines from the very beginning, check it out.
It's called The Confident Homeschool Foundations Program. There will be a link up above or down below, and if you check it out and you're interested, you can actually get 50% off the retail price. If you put the word "ROUTINE" in the coupon box. “ROUTINE” if you put in “ROUTINE.”.
It'll give you 50% off the retail price so that you can create the whole foundation that you need to have a successful and confident homeschool because that's why I make these videos. That's why I talk about this stuff. I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
At some point, if you homeschool, you will fight the fundamental homeschool battle.
You’ll be trying to motivate your kids. Trying to get them to do their math … or spelling … or reading.
And instead of gleefully going along with your plan, your kid will push back. They’ll be defiant. They’ll say “no.”
OR they’ll be passive aggressive and just sit there -- staring at you with a look that says, “I DARE you to make me learn anything.”
How do I know this??
I’ve seen so many different kinds of homeschool bad attitudes in my house. Maybe I’m just “lucky,” but my sense from talking to other homeschool moms is this is something that we all have to figure out in order to keep homeschooling successfully.
So what do you do?
How do you work with an uncooperative child and actually motivate them so they WANT to learn?
How do you work with your kid when they’re being defiant?
How do you fight the homeschool battle and win?
That’s what I’m talking about today. It’s not easy … but it is possible.
And if you get a few key things in place, you’ll find that you have fewer battles and more peace in your homeschool.
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video
Transcript
Hello. My name is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool, today we're gonna talk about how to battle a bad attitude in your homeschool. Do you have a homeschool kid who you just feel like has a bad attitude, they're grumpy, they're frustrated, and you're like, dude, just fix your attitude. This is going to get better. Well, this video then is for you. We're going to talk about how you battle those bad attitudes and help shift the energy in your home so it can be more positive.
And the first thing I want to say is you need to know, this is something every homeschool family struggles with because at some point, every kid's going to show up at some point with a bad attitude. And it happens all the time. It really, really does. And it can happen for all sorts of reasons and it can happen because you're having a bad day. It can happen because your kid's having a bad day, they're grumpy for some reason. It happens for all sorts of reasons. And so yeah, how do we battle this? How do we do this?
Well first, I just want to let you know I've seen it all, my kids, everything I'm about to tell you I have seen in my home. I've got four kids, I've been homeschooling for over 16 years. They are all teenagers. I have seen the bad attitude and what I'm about to tell you does actually make a difference. Okay? So first of all, let's talk about what bad attitudes look like. Because sometimes we just use these phrases and we don't get really clear on all the different ways a bad attitude might be showing up. Okay?
So you, a bad attitude can be a kid who's being sassy or rude. They're being disrespectful, they're talking back. That's a bad attitude. It can be a kid who is stonewalling you and just like giving you that stone cold face where they're refusing to do something and you say, I'd like you to do this. And they're just like, and they just stare at you. Like if I stare at you long enough, maybe you'll go away. That's “bad attitude”.
They might fall apart. So you ask them to do something and instead of working through it, their emotional regulation is so poor that they just, they throw a tantrum or they just start to cry and I'm not talking like tears of frustration and they're working through it. I'm talking about fall apart, can't handle it on the floor. It looks like a tantrum or maybe it just looks like a full on meltdown of other kinds.
It might also look like what I like to call “slothing,” where they just get super passive aggressive and they're doing it, but they're doing it really slow or they're doing it really sloppy. And it's this sort of like, "Well, you can make me do this, but you can't make me do it well", right. So these are all bad attitudes show up in life, lots of different ways and some are a little more subtle than others.So what do we do?
Well, first we recognize that some of this is to be expected because our children are human and they are learning how to be mature adults. And bad attitude is something that takes time to work out of your system. I know adults who still have bad attitudes who still do all of the things I just listed, right?
So it's not like we just come onto this planet knowing how to handle hard situations, knowing how to interact with people. So sometimes battling the bad attitude has as much to do with me just recognizing that it is actually going to show up and not being frustrated that it's there.
Recognizing that it is part of my children's human experience and it is also going to show up because part of this human experience is about agency and choice. It's about letting our kids make choices because one of the reasons they're on this planet is to learn how to make choices. And if we don't give them the space to do that, they don't learn. And so human beings by nature want freedom.
They want choice. That is like, embedded in the DNA of a human being. And so your child is figuring out agency and choice. And one of the ways they do that is by pushing back against the things you ask them to do. Well, if they're pushing back, there are respectful ways to do that, but those often have to be taught well. They do.
They have to be taught. They have to be learned and practiced. Meanwhile, bad attitude shows up, and bad attitude can show up in a four year old. It can show up in a 16 year old and it will look different most of the time, but it's going to show up because it's them practicing their agency in inappropriate ways. We want them practicing their agency. We just want them learning how to do it in an appropriate way. So it's recognizing that this is actually something that's supposed to happen.
Now, on top of that, it's also helpful to recognize that some kids just need more freedom and agency than others. They just, their little souls crave choice. And so if you have one of those kids, they're going to push back on everything. And often they'll do it in stronger and stronger and stronger ways. And you end up just doing this back and forth and back and forth as you're battling because this child's like, "I need to choose!" And you're saying, "I need you to do this." And so it becomes this battle, right? So recognizing that some kids need more agency and freedom can help you adjust your expectations of the bad attitude.
Okay. So with that, let's talk about a couple specific things that you can do to help make these battles less of a battle and more of a journey that you're taking together. The first one is to pick your battles, get really clear on what's important. Not everything is important. And if you pick all your battles, you won't win any of them. So decide what hill you're going to plant on. Decide which things are the most important and let other things go.
And depending on the kid you have, you may let a lot of things go that you normally would not let go. But you recognize that these things are the ones you're going to plant your flag on. That is the first thing. You gotta pick your battles and I have been amazed over the years at how many things I thought I had to hold on to that I really didn't. That didn't matter nearly as much as I thought they mattered and as I chose to let those things go, everything actually got better and not just because I was a pushover, but I was actually not fighting about everything. Okay.
The second thing is to set clear expectations. A lot of battles can actually happen because we think a kid should just know what we want them to do. And then they're frustrated because they thought they were going to get to do something different or they thought a different level of doing it was going to be okay. And so that battle happens because the expectations aren't the same.
I've talked about this in other videos and I'm going to talk about it more because it is so key to just all human interaction, but anytime you have conflict, anytime you have this going on, it's because your expectation does not match your child's expectation and any time expectation doesn't meet reality, there's going to be conflict. There's going to be unhappiness. There's going to be something negative.
So with the clearer you can get on expectations, the better off you are and then you need to have ways to follow through when they don't meet those expectations which you have shared in advance is kind of bigger than I want to go into in this whole video, but this expectations thing is sharing. Super important.
The third thing, and I just want to share today, is don't feed the monster. When your child starts to give you bad attitude and they start to push and they start to give you a hard time, it is going to trigger you. I don't care how calm you are, it's going to bug you because your agency, your human soul is not going to like it for all sorts of reasons.
And we're not going to go into all of those in this video, but you're not gonna like it and you're going to want to push back. And as you push back and they start to push back, it is going to bring up parts of you that maybe you don't like a whole lot that you don't like when they show up. Don't feed that monster. It is inside every single one of us.
Take a timeout, walk away, take a deep breath. There is almost nothing that your child is doing that requires immediate response. Almost everything can wait a little while till you've gotten to a place where you can respond and without the monster doing the talking. If you can do that, you will deescalate situations. It will not turn into this huge battle, but instead it will be something where you can actually be having rational conversations.
That's some of the ways to navigate this bad attitude that shows up, particularly when you're trying to get your kids to do stuff in your homeschool and they don't want to do it. The reality is when we're trying to get our kids to do stuff, it's because we're trying to motivate them. We're trying to tell them, you need to do this and this and this because we want them to get things done.
We want them to be motivated and in an ideal world, they'd be motivated to do those things without all of these battles, right? So if that is something that resonates with you, if you're wrestling with how do I set clear expectations? If you're wrestling with how do I motivate my kids, I want you to check out a course I've put together, it's called The Motivation Formula. There's a link up above, down below, you know, wherever you're watching this video.
And the reason is, I've gone through and I've talked in detail and really help you figure out how to manage the agency of your child while still setting expectations and asking them to do things I've talked about. How do you know what to do with a kid who really holds onto their agency? I've talked about how do you set those clear expectations so that after you get all these pieces in place, your kids will want to learn.
They'll be motivated to learn on their own without begging, without bribing, without yelling. All those things that you're doing that possibly are creating these battles that you're trying to avoid and creating the bad attitude even though you're not trying to. Sometimes the bad attitude comes from how we show up and not just how our kids are. So if that's something that sounds interesting, be sure to check it out.
It's like I said, the links up above, down below. It's called The Motivation Formula and it's a course I've put together to help you with some of these things because the reality is bad attitude shows up in every homeschool. But successful and confident homeschools, the ones where the moms are able to consistently keep going, are the ones who figure this out without it turning into world war three. And hopefully some of the things I've given you today have been helpful. If so, please know that I make these videos every week, every week, so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
One of the questions I hear all the time from new homeschool moms is “what does a typical homeschool day” look like?
And it’s an interesting question to try and answer.
I get where the question is coming from. A new homeschool mom is trying to figure out what do homeschool kids do all day?
How long should a typical homeschool day be?
It’s almost like she wants to pull back the curtain and see what the day in the life of a homeschool mom REALLY looks like.
But trying to answer what a typical day looks like is actually kind of a tricky question.
Because the truth is there really ISN’T a “typical” day.
Yes, there are homeschool routines that we follow. And there are homeschool rhythms and patterns.
But these adjust depending on the day, the season, and the needs of our family.
So what’s a homeschool mama to do?? Just roll out of bed and hope for the best??
Absolutely not!
Even though it’s constantly changing, there are ways to put together a homeschool schedule that works. And you can do it without losing the flexibility that homeschool offers AND requires.
So today I’m sharing what a “typical” homeschool day looks like in many homeschool families.
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
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Transcript
Hello. My name is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about what a typical homeschool day looks like. A typical day. This is a question that I see all the time. I see it in Facebook groups, I hear it at co-ops. You know, "What does a typical homeschool day look like?"
So that's what I want to cover today, and I'm going to start out by just, I don't know, sharing a little secret. There is no typical homeschool day. I know. I think that there's this myth out there, this, mystique that somehow there's just, you know, what does a day look like? And the reality is they're all really different. And so it's really challenging as a homeschool mom who's been doing this for over 16 years. It can be really challenging for me to just say, well, your typical day looks like this because there are so many things that affect a homeschool day. And things that you can control and things that you can't control.
So for example, you might have a kid that wakes up sick. You might have a holiday where your husband's home from work or a holiday where you guys decide to travel. You might have a car emergency, you might have a family emergency, you might have a, so those are all things you can't plan for. But then you might also have a field trip or a special activity or you know a moon, a new movie comes out and you really want to go see it as a family or, or the it snows and you want to take a snow day. Like those are all things where you actually kind of plan that those things are going to happen.
So you're constantly juggling what a typical day looks like because there really are no typical days, although there are rhythms and patterns to homeschool days. So today I'm not going to talk about a typical day, but I am going to talk about some rhythms and patterns that you can use to kind of get a picture of what homeschooling looks like.
All right, so I want to clarify. I've been homeschooling for over 16 years, which means that we started when my youngest was three and a half. They're now all teenagers. What my day looks like now when my youngest is 13, is really, really, really different than what it looked like when all my kids were, you know, eight and under or 10 and under. So I'm going to break this video into a couple parts.
We're going to talk about a typical day, typical a rhythm day, a pattern day when I'm home. And we're also going to talk about one when we're out and about, because it kind of divides into those two categories. And under each of those categories, I'm going to tell you what it used to look like when my kids were younger and what it now looks like now that my kids are teenagers. So we're going to cover each of those.
Let's start with what it looks like when you stay home with young kids. So staying home means that you don't have a field trip planned. You don't have an outing planned, you're not going to the co-op, you're just staying home and having a homeschool day. Well, the rhythm that we often did when it was sort of like a normal day is that my kids would get up, we would get dressed. We weren't a pajama family. There are homeschool families that are, we weren't. We would eat breakfast. We would then do kind of our chores, the work around the house. I would work with the kids, we would all kind of work together at the same time and then we would gather on the couch.
We would do devotional, we would, you know, morning time we would read books, we would do art study or we'd watch a video. It was kind of our gathering time. We would do games together. We'd have kind of our time together and then the kids would kind of separate and we'd have time alone and that's where I would kind of help the kids who might be working on something that they would need help with and then we would be done and they would go off and do their own playing their own passions, their own interests.
And that's when I would get my time. Now you might be thinking, well how long is that? While we would get up, and again this is just me, I know homeschool families who are super successful with all kinds of schedules, but we would get up roughly around seven in the morning and I would get up a little bit earlier cause I'm a morning person, but we would get up, we get up around there, we would start homeschool about nine or nine 30 and we'd usually be done about noon. Remember this is again when all my kids were little, maybe one o'clock if they had specific assignments cause they were 10, 11, 12. That's what it looked like when they were younger.
Now that they're older, it actually looks a lot different. So first of all, I now work and so I work early, early in the mornings again cause I'm a morning person and my kids don't actually get up and we don't get going until about 10 in the morning. They get up before that if they want to do things. But 10 is when we gather together. That's when we say prayer. We do our gathering time, we do our devotional. That's also when we kind of coordinate the day because now my teenagers are going all over the place and most of the time I'm actually a facilitator of them going directions.
Who needs the car? Who needs to be here, who am I driving? So-and-so is, you know, child A driving child D somewhere because some can drive and some can't. So now our day is much more about coordinating after we gather at around 10 and then they go off and do their independent work. And most of what they do now is independent. It doesn't require me anymore. I am available however to answer questions, to help with projects, to help with math problems. If I can still help with math problems to help with writing, things like that.
So my day looks really, really different now and my free time is actually different. It's, it's segmented throughout the day when they don't need my help. And sometimes I will schedule with a child and say, okay, we're going to sit down and do this particular assignment right now. Because they'll say, okay, well we'll schedule to meet together at 1:15 and we kind of treat it like that more like tutoring rather than a set time.
So that's, and then we wrap up and they, and there's often activities in the afternoon that we're going to, so I'm driving kids to lessons or other kids are driving kids to lessons or going to lessons, you know, and then we finish out the day.So it's very, very different now than when I was, when my kids were younger. So that's what typical normal days look like when we're home.
So let's talk about now what they look like when we're out and about. When my kids were little, and again this is all, you know 12 and under 11 and under, when we had an outing, whether it was a co -op day or just a field trip. And we're talking like a field trip that takes an hour. I did not do anything else homeschooling other than probably to gather and some kind of devotional. And what I mean by devotional, we said prayer, we would get up, we would try to get the work done.
If that happened, I would feed my children. So we'd get up, we'd have breakfast, probably get the work done and then we would go on the outing. And that was the day. Because by the time I got everybody ready, got in the car, went to the outing and got home, I was tired and I didn't have the energy. And it was so hard to like try to get back into our routine. And so I was very careful and intentional about how I would plan my school day and my school year, recognizing we were going to take lots of those days and I would have different kinds of expectations about how much we would accomplish with our book work or our reading book or our games or whatever. Because if we went somewhere that was it.
Now my kids are older, right, so getting ready to go somewhere is easier, but because they're independent, I actually let them decide when and how they want to get their independent work done. And I cancel the classes I'm still in charge of, so I'm still doing math with a couple of my kids on days when there's outings. On days when there's other things, we just don't do math because again, I recognize that by the time we get there we do the thing and we come home.
It, just for me, does not work my rhythm to put those classes and try to do them at, you know, four in the afternoon or six at night. Maybe some moms do, I don't. I'm just going to own it and say that's how it works for me. So that's what typical days look like when kids are younger, typical days look older.
And lest you think, I'm just talking from my own experience, having been around for 16 years, I've read a lot of people who have written out their schedules. I've read probably, Oh I probably have read a conversation or had a conversation or read at least a hundred different examples of days. And these are really the patterns that I see across the board. I see very few people who are super rigid and structured every day no matter what. Now this is one piece of being a successful homeschool mom is, how do you structure your day?
It is like you got to figure out how you kind of want the day to go. Cause the day is, the block, the building block of the week, the year, the month, the year and beyond. So if you're still in the research phase and you're trying to figure this out or you're thinking, "I have tried to be homeschooling, I'm trying to structure my day, I have no idea how to do it."
I definitely want you to check out a course I've put together, it's called The Confident Homeschool Foundations Program and this Confident Homeschool course is all about ,how do you be a successful homeschool mom. And it includes a huge portion on how you structure your day, including several examples of different types of days that you can structure that will all fit these general principles that I've shared with you.
If that sounds like that's something would be helpful, please check out the link up above, down below. You know wherever you're watching this video, and I'm going to give you a coupon code. If you use it, you will get 50% off the retail price and the coupon code is “typical” - TYPICAL. Doesn't matter if it's lower case or upper case, just put in the word typical. You'll get 50% off the price and it's going to give you everything that you need to set up a successful structured homeschool day in a way that works well for you.
It gives you a way to tailor and individualize it. So if that's something that would be helpful, be sure to check out the link. It will definitely be something that I think you can find that will be useful. I'm ToriAnn Perkey and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
Some days homeschooling is just hard!
The kids are struggling and whining and crying.
You’re struggling ... whining … and crying.
Nobody wants to do their work. Everyone is fighting.
The phone is ringing.
The entire neighborhood is at your house.
You’re trying to teach while also serve another family in need -- or just maintain your sanity.
Hard homeschool days come to every homeschool family. Days where you just want to throw in the towel and quit homeschooling!
Not every day, of course. Some days are wonderful and blissful and magical. Days where your kids and you are having a blast -- learning and growing together.
I’ve had many people tell me -- and I’ve found it true myself -- that you get one of those lovely days about 1 in 10. And believe me, these are the days that keep me going!
On top of that, many days can be “pretty good.” My kids are fairly compliant, stuff gets done, and nobody had a meltdown. We’ve gotten to the point (after 15 years) where we get a lot of “pretty good” days. (Want to know how we’ve done it? Check out my webinar “Confident Homeschool Secrets”)
But for the days that are trending toward disaster, what can you do?
How can you make homeschooling easier when you can sense where everything is headed?
Today I’m discussing 5 things you can do and say in the middle of a hard homeschool day. No - things won’t magically become “magical,” but you can reverse the trajectory and get your family headed back in the right direction.
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
Register below to watch my FREE CLASS
Confident Homeschool Secrets
7 Ways to Create a Homeschool That Works (and you LOVE!)
Transcript
Hello ToriAnn Perkey here, from my homeschool to your homeschool, today I want to talk about what you can say to yourself in the middle of a really hard homeschool day. I don't know about you, but there are days where everything just feels like it's crashing in. The kids aren't listening. I'm having a bad day. The phone's ringing off the hook. Kids are coming to, the additional kids are coming to the door you know. I'm hearing about stuff that's not working and everybody's grumpy and fighting and some days are just hard.
And if you're going to successfully homeschool, learning how to get through the hard days to the good days is definitely worth the effort, but you got to figure out how to get through the good days. Now, I've made another video on how to actually have a good day, and so if you haven't seen that video, be sure to check down below. I'm going to put a link to that video as well, but today I want to talk about what to say to yourself in the middle of a hard homeschool day.
Actually have five different things, five different types of things you can say to yourself to just get you through the day. Put yourself in bed so you can get up the next day.
Okay. So the first one, the first thing that you can say to yourself is, this is simple. This is easy. This is fun. Now this is all about training your brain to look at whatever is currently happening in a different light. Don't get me wrong, there are days where it doesn't feel simple, easy, or fun. But if I say it to myself enough, sometimes my brain shifts and I wait. Okay, okay, I can figure this out. So this is almost like a, like a Jedi mind trick that you're going to play with your brain to help you figure out how to do this. And so this is simple. This is easy. This is fun. Something to just perk yourself up in the middle of the day.
Okay. Number two, what's the second thing you can say to yourself? I need a timeout. Sometimes it is okay for you as the mom to pull yourself out of the situation. Go to your closet and just take a deep breath. I have spent many a homeschool day with part of the day in my closet. Now of course, you don't abandon your children. You either put them in front of something that they can watch or you put the older one in front of the younger ones. Whatever you can do.
Maybe you even just put everybody in a crib or a bed and you say, we're taking a time out and you go put yourself in a timeout. You take the time to figure out how you can reset and recharge. Sometimes when the days are really hard, that's what you need to do. You need to take just a minute to pull yourself out of the situation, get some perspective, let the emotions fall, you know, let the emotions kind of drain out of you just a little bit so you can come back into it with a fresh pair of eyes and possibly a slightly happier heart.
Okay, so the third thing, what's the third thing you can say? What do we really need right now? What does my child need right now and not what do they in the moment like they need, they maybe need to get their math done. No, I'm talking about what do they really need? Do they need a hug? Do they need some food? Do they need a nap? I don't know what your kid needs.
But often when things are really falling apart, it's because the needs aren't being met. So stepping back and saying, what do they really need? And maybe adjusting your plan for the day because you recognize that what your kid really needs is to sit on the couch and snuggle with you and feel better about themselves. Or maybe they need a conversation or maybe they just need a walk around the block. Whatever it is, will help you have, just help you reset. So that's the third thing.
Fourth, remember that you're on a journey. Take the long view. Sometimes we're having a really hard day because we're so worried and afraid that we're not getting everything done and we forget that it's really easy to underestimate how much you can accomplish in 10 years. And over estimate how much you can accomplish in a day. Less is more with homeschooling, so you might not get a whole lot done on a single day, but if you're showing up every day over the course of your child's education, you're going to accomplish a lot. So the next thing you can say to yourself is, I'm taking the long view. I'm looking down the road, I'm just gonna do one little piece today. We don't have to do it all today.
Finally, and this is what I say to myself when things really just hit the fan and everything else, there just doesn't seem to be any other answer. This too shall pass. Sometimes we don't change things. Sometimes we gracefully make it through things and sometimes we don't make it through gracefully. We just make it through, right? This too shall pass. When I remember that nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever and I always have tomorrow. It helps me get through the end of a really hard homeschool day.
Now if you are new to homeschooling or you are struggling, be sure to check out my free homeschool help center. It's down below full of different activities. Resources, helps to help you have a good homeschool, things like this, as well as other things in there. Specifically, there are additional declarations, phrases that you can say to yourself to help you pump yourself up so you can have a good homeschool day. Be sure to check it out. That's down below. My name is ToriAnn Perkey, and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
Choosing the best homeschool curriculum can be daunting!
So many choices. So much variety. So many options.
And each claim that they will help your child love learning. That they will be the “right fit.” That they will help you as a mom homeschool successfully.
And the reality is each CAN be the right homeschool curriculum for you … but not all of them can.
So how do you choose?
How do you wade through the massive number of curriculum choices to find the best homeschool curriculum for your kids?
After 16 years of homeschooling, I’ve developed 3 simple steps you can take to decide which curriculum is right for your family.
They aren’t foolproof -- but these steps have saved me tons of money and tons of false starts.
And while not every homeschool curriculum is a slam dunk (we’ve spent years looking for the best homeschool math curriculum for our family), I’ve been pretty successful overall with my choices.
And since these steps can be applied by any homeschool mom, they should also work well for you!
In this video I share one of the best ways to set up your homeschool so you can be confident and successful. Check out my Confident Homeschool Foundations Program.
Use the coupon code “PickPerfect” to get over 50% off the regular price!
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
Don’t forget to check out my Confident Homeschool Foundations Program.
Use the coupon code “PickPerfect” to get over 50% off the regular price!
Transcript
Hello ToriAnn Perkey here and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about three simple steps that you can take to pick out the perfect curriculum.
Ah, isn't that the desire of every homeschool mom to find the perfect curriculum so that your kids will magically want to do everything that you want them to do. This'll be the curriculum that your children will wake up excited to do, that they will never complain. They will never whine. They will be thrilled and their learning will exponentially increase.
Yeah. Actually the perfect curriculum, "perfect" doesn't exist, but in this video, I am going to give you three simple steps to help you find the best curriculum for your child at this point in time. And you can do a much better job of finding good curriculum without spending a lot of money and a lot of time researching and getting lost in the details. Because the reality is when you're researching curriculum, particularly if you're just starting out, the options are overwhelming.
I know it's hard to believe this, but it's actually a good thing. When I started homeschooling over 16 years ago, man, there just weren't a ton of options out there and the number of people who have created amazing possibilities in the last 16 years while I've been doing this is mind boggling and that's great. That means you can find an option that's going to be a good fit for you and your family and your child. The downside is that means you have so much more to figure out and research. So let's talk about three simple steps to kind of narrow it down to make it just a little bit easier for you.
Now the first step, the very first step I recommend is actually getting clear on your vision for your homeschool. Why are you homeschooling? What are you hoping to accomplish and what is your sort of philosophy? What are you, why are you homeschooling? And this is a really important question to answer because different types of curriculum are actually going to feed into different attitudes about education in general. And so if you know what your reason for homeschooling is, you can start to weed out the ones that just don't line up.
You know, if you're really, really big on child led learning and discovery, you're not gonna want a rigid curriculum that's just do step A, step B, step C. If you are a family, you're very focused on getting your children into an elite school and having them have the best academic opportunities possible. You may want something that has a more structured classical approach. So it's not about right or wrong, it's about getting clear on what you want.
Now, if you need help creating that vision, I do actually have a free training all about how to create a vision for your homeschool. You can check out the link down below. It walks you through the process so that you, by the end of about 30 minutes, have a really solid vision for your homeschool. So step number one, get clear on your vision.
Step number two, think about your kids. The curriculum is for them, but they're not all going to be the same. No two kids are the same. And certainly there's different kinds of categories of kids. So you want to learn and think a little bit about their personality, about their learning styles. Do they need to be up and moving around and wiggling a lot or do they do okay if they're sitting and doing bookwork for awhile? Different curriculums cater to different styles and of course you would hope that curriculum that's designed for younger children, all younger children are more wiggly than older kids. But there are some teenagers who that sitting is just not going to work for them in the same way.
So get clear on your kid. How do they learn how, what's their personality? What are their needs? As you spend time doing that, what will happen is you will be able to have a better sense of which curriculums are going to line up with the needs of your kid. And don't forget to keep in mind that you're the one teaching the curriculum. So you do want to get clear on are you going to be really involved? You need to have a little bit less involvement. Maybe you're doing this with a kid and so they need to have an outside recorded instructor. Maybe you need to nurture that child so you wanna spend more time together and just what do you need? Do you need something that's a little more structured? Do you want it to be more open ended? You are one of the kids that you need to be looking at. Okay, so that's the second thing. Get to know your kid.
Third one, get kind of, so you kind of know about the different philosophies of homeschooling. Homeschooling has been around long enough now that it's kind of branched off into different ways. There's classical, there's Charlotte Mason, there's Thomas Jefferson education, there's Waldorf, there's Montessori, there's eclectic, there's world schooling or road schooling. There's unschooling and many, many more. Those are kind of the big ones and getting to know a little bit about each one of those will help you determine what kind of curriculum you want.
Because some curriculum is designed specifically for classical education or Charlotte Mason education and you're going to see those words pop up a lot. Also, if you're asking and doing research and reading things and you know that that's not a style that's going to fit for your family, then you can just automatically let go of that particular curriculum choice even if it comes highly recommended cause you know it doesn't fit with what you are looking for. So the third one is you want to review the philosophies and get clear.
Now once you have those three steps in place, you can go do research and research is, there's a couple different ways. One, there's a book by Kathy Duffy that I absolutely love. I've done another video on that, a link down below to that video and she has put together a book on the 102 top homeschool picks. Love the book. So worth the purchase. It will actually help you walk through these steps.
The second one is your good old friend, Google. If you can put in, I need a reading curriculum for a really wiggly or a kinesthetic kid, that's Charlotte Mason, you're going to get a much more solid set of options to research. Rainbow resources, another really great place to go. A lot of curriculum there and they talk about these things and the different personalities and things like that. Social media is actually a great place to go, particularly Facebook groups that are aligned with your philosophy. You can ask questions about it in just geographic Facebook groups or in specific Facebook groups that aligned with those educational philosophies.
And then another thing that I just want to let you know is I actually have a course that goes through all of these topics and a whole bunch more to help you set up your homeschool, but particularly things to help you set up your homeschool with the right curriculum so that you can be successful. It goes along with the free training that I offered you earlier so you can join the free training, totally free to go set up your vision.
But if you also want to learn about how your kids can, you know, learn more about your kid's personality, learn about learning style. If you're really, really interested in learning about the different educational philosophies along with other helps, like how to do planning, recordkeeping, how to structure your day once you figured out the curriculum so you can actually fit everything in. I think this course is really going to help you.
It's called the Confident Homeschool Foundations Program and I'm going to just give you a special coupon. Normally it's $97 and I just want you to go check it out. You can click the link below, but with this coupon that I'm about to give you, you can get the whole thing for $47 you just want to put in the word “PickPerfect”. No spaces “PickPerfect”. If you put that in, then you can get this entire course that lays out everything that you need to know to be a super successful and confident homeschool mom for only $47! That's pretty crazy.
So, but regardless of whether you want to do that, there is definitely the free training in there on how to set your vision, which is always the first step that I recommend. No matter what you're working on because it lays the foundation for everything else. All right. Good luck on your curriculum. If you have any questions, you can put those down below. I often don't answer specific curriculum questions, but I can point you in direct resources into resources that will be helpful.
I'm ToriAnn Perkey and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
How much screen time is too much?
How much screen time should my kid have?
What is a healthy amount of screen time per day?
Are screens bad for you no matter what?
I don’t know a single mom (homeschool or not) who hasn’t thought about these questions!
We ask them at park day.
We ask them at co-op.
We ask them to our husbands.
And we ask them at night when we are staring at the ceiling trying to figure out what to do about the glowing squares in our homes.
I do NOT profess to have all the answers. My oldest is currently 19, my youngest is 13 … and the screen landscape has changed so much since I began parenting.
We are the first generation of moms who are trying to figure this out. And it seems like every few years there is something posted that contradicts the “findings” of the previous study.
>> Screens and social media are TERRIBLE and will ruin your kids.
But over the years, I’ve developed a set of questions to determine how much screen time is too much.
These questions help you, as a parent, identify the symptoms of too much screen time. Because “experts” don’t know your family and your kids -- which is unique.
I believe that screens can be good -- when used in moderation. But I also believe each kid (and each family) is different, so you must come up with your own guidelines rather than depend solely on outside sources.
As a result, I’ve developed 3 questions you can ask yourself to determine if your kids (and you!) are getting too much screen time.
These questions will help you set screen time rules for your kids that feel like they make sense and actually can work.
You may find yourself limiting screen time for your kids. OR you may find yourself giving a little bit more.
That’s the beauty of these questions … they let you craft the screen time guidelines that work best for YOUR family.
Want to keep reading instead of watch? Scroll to read a transcript of the video.
Register below to watch my FREE CLASS
Confident Homeschool Secrets
7 Ways to Create a Homeschool That Works (and you LOVE!)
Transcript
Hello ToriAnn Perkey here and from my homeschool to your homeschool today, I want to talk about screen time.
Ooh, this is a tricky topic. How much screen time is too much screen time. Oh, I wish there was an easy answer and it feels like every time I'm turning around there's a different answer. And I have been wrestling personally with this question since my kids were little and now they are teenagers. It seems like there is never a good answer to how much screen time is too much screen time.
So if you have struggled with this like I have. Today, I have just three simple answers, three questions you can ask yourself to determine whether or not your kids are getting too much screen time. Now before we get into that, I just want to remind you that this is a debate that's been raging for a long time, long before computers, long before phones.
But the question is getting harder and harder to answer because the amount of screen time that's available and readily accessible continues to grow and grow and grow until it feels like a parent that you just have no way of knowing how do I figure this out? The articles in the media, I'm reading study after study, one study will say, this is why screen time is so bad or this is why we need to be worried about this. And then the next one will come back and will say, no, no, no, actually that study was done incorrectly. This is the one we should pay attention to.
So my goal today is to give you principles, principles that you can apply regardless of the noise. As people, as scientists and people out there are debating how much screen time is too much screen time. Because the answer to that seems to be constantly changing everywhere else.
So here is the first question to ask yourself and this is the first sign if you can't give a good answer to this question. When they get off, what is their behavior like? So if your kid has been doing screens, whether it's a little bit or a lot, what is their behavior like? Do they get off with a cheerful attitude? Are they pleasant? Are they willing to then engage in other things? Or do they whine, complain, get angry, maybe they're rude to you, disrespectful.
If you're seeing consistent negative behavior when your child gets off, even if it's not immediate, like in the next little while, that's a sign that for them the screens are too much. Whatever amount there is, and this is not about what scientists say, this is how your child reacts and it's important to remember every kid's brain is going to react differently to screens.
Just like every adult brain reacts differently to screens. It just impacts our brains differently. And so your child is going to be telling you by their behavior whether or not they've had too much and that might be cumulative, that might be a one time episode. But if you're seeing lots of negative behavior, that means that the screen time, however much it was, was too much for them.
Okay. Second question. Question to ask yourself, what am I noticing? And again, it's going to lead to a sign. Is my child being creative or do they lack creativity? Particularly creativity that I used to see. So children, little children will naturally be very, very creative and as they get older that creativity tends to start moving to different directions. But everyone is naturally creative and your children are no exception. So if they get off screens or it's a day and they say, Oh, I could do this or this, or I could watch screens, then you know it's probably okay.
But if all they think about is their screen time, if all they think about is getting on the screen to do the next thing, then maybe there is a problem. If it's consuming their thoughts, if they seem obsessed, if they don't seem to be able to come up with anything else to do, they wander around bored and there's nothing in their world. They're getting too much screen time.
If you dial it back, what you'll start to see, particularly if you do a detox period, what you'll start to see is they will start to be creative again. They'll start to discover other things to do because the brain doesn't want to just be empty. The brain wants to do something, so it will start to find other things to do because it's not doing screens.
Okay, so with this, I want to put in a little tiny caveat. Sometimes particularly as your children get older, their creativity is on screens. So they are using digital art. They might be doing something with video, they might be designing a game. This gets a little bit trickier because they are being creative but they're being creative on the screen so it still applies. But you want to be careful if they're obsessed about watching recreational screens and recreational or are consuming screens is where they're just passively taking it in. That's one thing.
If they are being productive and they want to actually accomplish something and they're looking towards a goal and they're making things happen. And well that's a little bit more on the creativity side and then you're going to be looking for these other two signs that I'm giving you. The one I've already given you, the one I'm about to talk to. Does this productivity actually lead to positive results or negative results? So I just wanted to put that out there.
Okay, so third sign. What is the third thing that you can be looking for? The third question you can be asking yourself to determine, is my kid getting too much screen time? And the third one is are they prioritizing screens over relationships? This is, this is when you look at how do they treat their siblings, particularly if they have to share or if a sibling gets in the way of something they're doing on the screen time.
How do they handle when someone tries to talk to them and they have to disengage from the screen in long enough to have that conversation. Do they have a positive attitude? Are they willing to stop what they're doing in order to have that, have that face to face conversation. Or are they consistently, again, grumpy, frustrated or they just go in the zone and they completely ignore everyone around them and then almost feel angry when you pull them out? If that's the case, probably too much screen time.
But if they have a good attitude, if they're willing to share, if, if the screen is actually becoming a cooperative, collaborative experience where everyone's gathered around watching the latest, you know, YouTube clip that's making everyone laugh, then maybe the screen time is doing good things too and only you can figure that out.
So three questions, quick recap.
Behavior when they get off, how are they behaving?
Question, are they being creative? And the side note there, are they being productive, are they producing good things and putting good things in the world?
And the third one is how are they prioritizing prioritizing their relationships? How do they treat the people around them?
If you can answer that, those three things are going well, then you probably are doing okay with how much screen time you're, how much screen time you're providing.
Now this is the part that gets a little tricky and I have to do this self-assessment. How are you doing on these three questions? If you're kind of grumpy when someone interrupts you or you have to get off. If maybe you can't think of anything else to do except scroll social media and check out the latest feed and maybe sometimes you find yourself completely ignoring the people in your world because you're in your own little world. Then maybe, just maybe, you have too much screen time and that is a subject for a whole nother video. Just wanted to put out there now, don't forget I have a, actually I didn't tell you about this yet.
One of the ways that you can also figure out how much screen time you want to have in your family is to create a vision for you, your family and your homeschool vision is super, super important. It's how you dig in and successfully figure out what it is you want your homeschool to look like. And I have a free class that you've, a free training that you can listen to. It'll walk you through how to do that. You just click the link below and check that out. It's totally free. It'll help you set your vision, which is one of the steps that helps you figure out how much screen time you want to have.
I'm ToriAnn Perkey and I make these videos, videos about all kinds of homeschool topics to help you be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
It happens even to the best homeschool mom …
You’ve got your homeschool year planned out. It’s full of fun activities and awesome field trips.
You’ve got the perfect curriculum (if there is such a thing!) and the perfect school room.
And then things start to fall apart.
The kids don’t want to do that amazing activity. They fight you to do math or they groan when you pull out the science book.
And you start to think “WHY am I doing this?!?” And you’re ready to quit!
How do I know? … Because I’ve been there over and over and over again.
After 15+ years, I’ve wanted to quit homeschooling more times than I can count.
I’ve had sleepless nights wondering if I was failing my kids.
I’ve worried that we weren’t doing enough … or that I was pushing too hard (or not hard enough!)
But I found ways to push through … which is why after 15+ years, I’m STILL homeschooling.
How did I do it? That’s what I’m talking about today.
So if you’re struggling with your homeschool. If you want to quit but KNOW you have to keep going … this video is for you. ❤️
In the video I talk about creating a homeschool vision. If that’s something you need help with, check out my FREE lesson on how to create a homeschool vision!
Register below to watch my FREE CLASS
Confident Homeschool Secrets
7 Ways to Create a Homeschool That Works (and you LOVE!)
Transcript
Hello,
My name is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about what do you do if you don't want to homeschool anymore, but you know you have to keep going. Or you know, you should be homeschooling but you really, really, really don't want to homeschool anymore. What do you do? Okay, so this happens to all of us.
I've been homeschooling for over 15 years. I've got four kids. You know, we started when they were really little. Now they're all teenagers and beyond. And there have been lots of times where I think, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to keep going. But I knew deep down in my heart that I was supposed to keep going. So you know, what do you do?
There were lots of reasons why I got there. You know, maybe it's sometimes it was because my kids were driving me crazy. They didn't want to work or they were fighting all the time. Things like that. And that was really hard. Sometimes it was because I was in a bad place. I was really struggling over the course of our homeschool life. I've had lots of experiences where I personally was falling apart and I'm trying to hold together this whole homeschool thing and my house thing while this part of me over here is not working. And that was really hard.
Another reason that I found some times that I would be really struggling is I would have this dream, this picture in my head of what homeschool should look like and our reality. It was not matching the dream, and that disconnect between the two would be so difficult. I just want to throw in the towel.
So how did I do it? How did I keep going all of these years? Because 15 plus years is a long time. Well, let's talk about that. You know, what do you do? I'm going to go through six different things and I'm sure there's more. But I think all of these done, one or more of these, can help you kind of, you know, get a little bit of the fire back, a little bit of the desire back. Because I, you know, if you're supposed to still be homeschooling, we want to make it so it's not quite as hard as drudgery, as something you're dreading. Okay.
So the first thing, I talk about this all the time, is you go back to the vision, you go back to why you started in the first place and it's really important that you have this written down so you can go back and look at it just in these times. Because if you go back and you look at your vision, you'll remember why you did it in the first place. And I can't tell you how many times I referenced my vision. My vision for tailoring an education, my vision for helping my kids who had special needs, all of these different reasons. I think, okay, I can do this because it's that important to me. And if you don't have a vision, you need to write one.
I have a free lesson that you can access immediately that will help you work through the steps to write your homeschool vision. I'll leave a link down below or up above, you know, wherever you're watching this video so you can go do that. That's the first thing I recommend. Go back to the vision.
The second thing I recommend you do is assess what is not working. Are there underlying problems that need to be addressed? Is it a long term thing? Is it a short term thing? Have you just been through a major life change, a new baby, a move, something like that that's affecting how you feel about the homeschool or just how you're feeling about life in general. And homeschool seems like the thing to quick, is it, is it a long-term issue that maybe needs to be addressed?
Is it a discipline thing and you're having trouble parenting, which just is exacerbated when you're homeschooling? Is it because you have a child who is really struggling in areas that have nothing to do with academics? Maybe they have depression, maybe that they have reading or other learning issues. You know, something that you recognize as kind of a long-term journey and you need to give time to that. But because they're struggling in that way or your struggling, the overall homeschool is suffering. So is there something that needs to be addressed and if so, how can you address it?
You know, once you become really intentional about recognizing what the problem is, then you begin to say, okay, what is it I need to do to be able to fix or address or manage this issue? So that's the second thing I recommend you do. Assess what is it that's actually working and not working.
The third thing I recommend you do is, you know, review your schedule and figure out are you trying to do too much? Because when you have a really packed schedule, you feel overwhelmed and you can start dreading anything related to homeschooling because everything feels too hard. And I've made another video that's all about the benefits of simplifying your homeschool schedule and some ways to go about doing that. I will leave a link down below this video so you can check that out. If that is something that you need to maybe do is just go through your schedule and figure out is there a way to simplify it.
The next thing is asking yourself is there a way to change things up? You know, sometimes the reason we are so dreading our homeschool and we want to quit is because we've done the same thing over and over and over and we're just bored and boredom is a killer. Like it makes it so you don't want to do anything. So maybe it's time to change it up.
Even if what you were doing is something you were super committed to and it was working and it might just be time to put that aside for a while. And just go on field trips for a little bit or just watch documentaries for a while or just snuggle and do, I don't know, an entire review of all the Disney Canon. You know, whatever it is that would kind of just recharge you and your kids and kind of get you in a place where you think, yeah, we can go back and try some of those other things. Sometimes taking a break and changing it is really awesome.
Another way you can consider changing it is, maybe instead of just completely taking a break, you decide that instead of doing this kind of math, you're going to take a break and you're gonna switch it up and you're going to play math games or you are going to do math activities. And just the switch of this focus on how you're doing the subject can also make a huge, huge difference.
The last thing I recommend is, no, two more things. One is take an actual break and I kind of alluded to that just a minute ago. You know the reason we homeschool is because we can take breaks, adjust schedules, revise and change up things. So it may be that you need your fall break, significantly like, end of November all the way through to the end of the year. It may be that you need your spring break in February where you're and you might then take a second spring break in April. You might need that.
You might need to say, you know what, we're just going to not homeschool on Fridays for the near future. We're just going to have a day to play. You know, taking a real break where you have a mental downtime, you get to work on some of those other projects can make a big difference and then you can come back and be excited to start up again.
Now the final thing I recommend is take a look at your own self care. And I know self care is super like popular buzzy word. Everybody's talking about how you need to do self care. And almost to the point where I'm, I personally am kind of annoyed about hearing about it. But I am going to bring it up because the reason it has become so trendy is because it's based in fact.
If you aren't taking time for you, if you aren't making time for a little bit of recharge time, you will burnout. And burnout is a huge problem in the homeschool world. Because on top of all the normal mom and home and home running things you have to do, you also have homeschool. And many of you are also working part time or you're juggling a new baby or all of those. You have to carve out just a little bit of time for you.
Now what you do during that time, totally up to you. For some people it's doing some kind of crafting. For some people it's going to a store by yourself. For some people it's sitting down and reading. For some people it's just going into a quiet, dark closet and closing the door and just turning off your mind for a couple minutes while you listen to some quiet music.
You get to decide what your special time is, but if you aren't making that special time, then ultimately your brain and your body will start to shut down. And that's one of the reasons you're feeling the way you do is because you just are feeling like you just never get a break. So if you don't have time for that, if you legitimately look around and you say, I don't know how I would make time for that. Then it is time to assess what can I cut out? What can I simplify? What can I let go of, change my expectations, to just give myself a little bit of time for that self care.
All of these things, you know, one or more of these things will help you get a little bit of the desire back, a little bit of the fire so that you go from thinking, "I do not want to homeschool." To "You know what? I like this. This is why I'm doing this. This is a good thing. I'm happy to be here. Let's go."
I'm ToriAnn Perkey and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
Would you like to know one of the easiest ways to become a better homeschool mom?
AND turn off the homeschool mom guilt and fear?
It doesn’t have anything to do with homeschool field trips or activities.
It doesn’t have anything to do with your kids or your schoolroom or how organized you are.
Instead, it has EVERYTHING to do with what YOU are doing when you look around.
Are you comparing to others … and then beating yourself up for how your homeschool is failing?
Do you see the perfect pictures of happy kids doing their schoolwork and then remember how your kids fought you to even pick up a pencil?
Do you read about major art projects with multi-day hands-on help and wish you had done more than just put on a Netflix documentary?
Mama - you can’t DO that to yourself!
Homeschooling is about you and your family -- NOT what everyone else is doing
And the fastest way to homeschool burnout or to feel like you want to quit homeschooling is to compare your worst to another mom’s best!
So today I’m talking about HOW to stop comparing … and instead how to start enjoying your homeschool.
In the video, I explain the importance of having a homeschool vision. If you need help, be sure to check out my FREE lesson on creating your homeschool vision.
Register below to watch my FREE CLASS
Confident Homeschool Secrets
7 Ways to Create a Homeschool That Works (and you LOVE!)
Transcript
Hello.
My name is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool. Today I want to talk about one way to help you have a successful homeschool.
I want to talk about not comparing. I want to talk about this thing that we do. Every homeschool mom does it, and when comparing happens, we feel fear. We feel concern, worry, even overwhelm. It is not doing your homeschool any good. So we are gonna talk about why you need to stop.
You see, it is so easy to compare in the homeschool world. You can look around on Facebook, on Instagram, on Pinterest, and you see all the things that other homeschool moms are doing. You see the activities they're doing. You see the books that they're reading. You see the beautiful, wonderful, exciting, homeschool moments because those are the ones that we take pictures of and we post.
We don't post things that aren't working. We mostly post the things that do. That's why we celebrate. On top of that, you're going to park days, you're going to your homeschool co-op, you're going to your homeschool whatever. You're interacting with other homeschool moms and they're talking about what their kids are doing. They're talking about the 14 year old kid who is graduating from high school and is starting to work on their associates degree. They're talking about their four year old that just started to read Shakespeare or Harry Potter or whatever, and it is so easy to compare their best to your worst.
You're thinking, Oh my goodness, your kid is graduating from high school and my teenager, I can't even get them out of bed and I'm covered in Cheerios because I've got a baby on my hip and we're trying to teach this kid to read that’s struggling to read. And you know, all we did today that was noteworthy at all is maybe my kid drew some stick figures.
That's how it happens, right? You're hearing these cool things and that's what's going through your head. I'm failing, I'm failing and failing because we're having this experience and everyone else is having this experience and that comparison, that back and forth that is what's killing your homeschool. And it's not what you have to do. You don't have to sit there and do this comparison because the reason you chose to homeschool is because you wanted to create a homeschool for your kids.
You're not homeschooling all those other kids. You're homeschooling your kid and you don't know the whole story. You know your whole story. You know the good, the bad, the ugly, you know the warts that show up all the time. But you don't know the story. You don't know if that 14 year old who's graduating and is going on is dying inside because they're struggling with anxiety or depression or they feel like they have this perfectionist need to excel.
You don't know that. You don't know that that four year old who maybe is just on a rockstar trajectory with their reading is struggling to just learn how to count. Or struggling, how to, you know, write or struggling with anger and they're constantly getting in trouble. You know, the mom's not talking about those things. She's just talking about what her kids are doing well. One, because she doesn't want to air her dirty laundry. And also because we do want to celebrate our successes and not just all of the things that are going badly.
And so you just don't know the whole story. And the reality is it doesn't matter. We can celebrate successes, but in the end you are in charge of your homeschool. You are in charge of your kids, which means that you are going to create an experience for them.
And the number one way you avoid comparing and turn that off in, in a way that is helpful is you make sure that you've got a vision for your homeschool that you reference regularly and that everything else that you're creating is structured around that vision. And I talk about this a lot because it is so important.
If you have not yet written a vision for your homeschool, I have a free lesson you can, access it immediately and it walks you through. It's, it doesn't take very long and it walks you through how to create a vision for your homeschool that works for you and your kids. And I'm going to put a link down below, up, above wherever you're watching this video. So that you can go in and create a vision and then you're going to have a homeschool that works for you. It's going to take you on your homeschools journey to the destination you want for your unique child. Stop the comparing and create a space where your kids can thrive without worrying about what everyone else is doing.
Now I'm going to put in a caveat. It is helpful to know what else other people are doing because sometimes you can recognize that there's something going wrong that you need to fix. Or you'll learn about a new resource or a new way of doing something that can be super helpful or it can also just be great to know, yeah, you know what? We're all in this together. So it's not that you want to shut yourself out and not be listening to what anybody else is doing. You're just looking at it from a fact finding and celebrating standpoint rather than a look, we're failing, standpoint.
And your vision is how you start that and it's recognizing that you are creating a homeschool for your kids and your family and not anybody else's. And if you can do that, the success in your homeschool will go way, way up. I'm ToriAnn Perkey, and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
It happens to the best of us homeschool moms …
We start out with the best of intentions. Give a great education. Cover all the bases. Make sure they are learning the important stuff. Make sure they are having fun and falling in love with learning.
But before we know it, we are doing too much. We’re trying to cram everything in … every single day. We don’t get through everything. The kids are drowning.
Homeschooling feels overwhelming and hard and stressful.
And then we start to feel homeschool mom guilt … they aren’t learning everything they need to know!
And we start to feel homeschool mom fear … “They’re falling behind! They won’t get into college!”
And the biggest one of all … “I’m FAILING as a homeschool mom!!”
How do I know this?? Because I’ve done and thought each of those thoughts.
Every. Single. One.
However, one of the biggest reasons I’m still homeschooling is because over the years, I figured out how to simplify my homeschool.
My homeschool planning got simpler and simpler.
What we did each day got less complicated and faster to put together.
I paired our homeschool schedule waaaaaay back.
And my homeschool stress went down. And the homeschool success went way up!
Today I want to share five benefits of simplifying your homeschool that I’ve seen in my own home AND in the homes of other homeschoolers.
In the video, I explain the importance of having a homeschool vision. If you need help, be sure to check out my FREE lesson on creating your homeschool vision.
Transcript
Hello, my name is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool today I want to talk about five benefits of simplifying your homeschool schedule. Oh my goodness.
It is so easy for your homeschool schedule to get more and more complicated. It's easy because there are so many options out there for homeschooling. And we as homeschool moms we'll research this and we'll research this and we'll research this. And then we start buying all of these different curriculum or we'd start cobbling together all these cool things that we're seeing on Pinterest, and other people talk about at our co-op and we pull it all together.
And before you know it, you have a really complicated homeschool schedule and it is so easy to do this. Why? Why do we do this? Why do we pull from so many different places? Why do we try to cram so many different things into our schedule?
Well, it's usually because we're afraid that we're going to leave something out. We're going to miss some important point that our kids need to have. We're going to get our kids into their adult life and they won't know something that they need to know. And so the idea is, well, if we just do as much as possible, we'll somehow cover all the bases and everything will be taken care of. And the reality is that is not only impossible to actually accomplish, it's also detrimental to your entire homeschool. So today I want to talk about the benefits of not doing that.
What are the benefits to keeping your homeschool simple because less is more, less allows you to accomplish a lot more than more does. And that's counter intuitive, but it's true. So how do you actually do this? Like we're going to talk about the benefits and we're going to talk about all this, but simplifying your schedule. Well, before I get into the benefits, I do want to talk about the fact that this is something you have to be considering and thinking about on an ongoing basis.
I know that about every four months I have to sit down and really think through everything that we're doing and think, should we be doing this? And every time I do that, I usually do it you know, in the fall as we're getting started as I'm planning the homeschool year. I always do it around the holidays as we move into the second half of the school year. And then I'm always looking at our summer and thinking about what does our school life, homeschool life, just life need to look like in the summer. I'm usually doing it in about four month chunks and because I'm doing it every so often, one of the things I have to do is go back and look at the vision for my homeschool.
I have to make sure that what I want for my homeschool is what we're actually accomplishing. And if that's something you haven't done yet, if you have not yet written your homeschool vision, you need to, and I have a free lesson that you can go ahead and access that will walk you through step by step how to create a homeschool vision. I'm going to leave a link for that down below or up below, up above, you know, wherever you're watching this video so that you can go get your homeschool vision written. Because as I go through all the reasons why you want to do this, if you don't know how to do it, then it's kind of not going to help you out a whole lot.
So let's talk about this. What are the five benefits of simplifying your homeschool schedule? Well, the first one is you're going to be less overwhelmed when you don't have so much to do and so much to think about. And so many things that are falling behind. You actually feel less overwhelmed. When you feel less overwhelmed, you have more fun in your homeschool, you're more excited to homeschool. You show up in just a better way, which means your kids are going to have more fun. And that is actually the second benefit.
When you simplify your homeschool schedule, your kids will also be less stressed, less assignments, less to do's, less just feeling that mom is frustrated because not everything is getting done. And depending on the kid, you're either getting pushed back or you're getting a kid who's trying to please you. And either way it creates stress.
So the second benefit is your kids are less stressed, which means they're having more fun, which means they're enjoying homeschooling, they're looking forward to it. And when both of you are having a good time and looking forward to homeschool, everything gets better.
Okay, so what's the third one? What's the third benefit? You're more likely to do what you actually scheduled, right? If you have 10 things scheduled and you only get to three of them, then not only are you stressed, but you're only getting to three of them, which means you're putting all this effort, mentally at least, into all 10 things, but you're only getting to three. But if you only schedule three things because you recognize that you're trying to simplify and you're just going to dig down deep and do just what really matters, you're going to go in depth. You'll get those three things done because that's what actually fits into your schedule, not what you want to have fit into your schedule.
The fourth benefit. The fourth benefit is it is less expensive when you simplify your schedule. Now I know you can homeschool for free. I know there's lots of resources out there and that's almost one of the reasons our homeschools get so complicated is because there are so many free things we can download. But we are also often spending a lot of money on curriculum. Curriculum that you start and you don't finish because you have too much scheduled, so if you simplify and purchase less, you will save money. If you simplify, you will buy fewer supplies for science experiments or activities or art activities that you never get to. You'll only buy what you actually need and you'll own and then you will actually use what you purchase.
The fifth benefit, and I think this is one of the best ones after lowering your stress level and your kid's stress level, is that you will actually go deep instead of broad. Instead of skimming the surface of all the different things that you're trying to cover in a frantic way, you'll get to go deep and really dig in to the topics, both that your kids are interested in and the ones that you feel are really important. And in the end, there is more value in really grasping onto some things than skimming over the surface and ultimately forgetting a lot of things.
So those are five benefits that I have personally found come from simplifying your homeschool schedule. Huge, huge changes will happen in your homeschool as you find a way to do less to accomplish more. I'm ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool, I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.
