Tag Archives for " planning "

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.

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.

How to Pick 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.

3 Simple Steps

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.

Step 1 Create a Homeschool Vision

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 2 Learn the Personality and Learning Styles of Your Kids

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.

Step 3 Explore Different Homeschool Philosophies 

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.

Research Different Homeschool Curriculum Options

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.

Use Google to Narrow Your Choices

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.

Learn from Other Homeschool Moms 

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.

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.

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. 

Why You Need to Simplify Your Homeschool Schedule

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?

Homeschool FOMO

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.

Homeschool Review and Reboot

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.

#1 Less Overwhelmed

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.

#2 Kids Have More Fun

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.

#3 Completing 

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.

#4 Less Expensive

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.

#5 Deep Dive

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.