Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Avoiding Homeschool Burn Out


This isn't a "how-to" post. This is an account of how I have avoided burn out this year.

So we are in our 14th week of the school year and while we haven't exactly found our "groove" yet, I have certainly figured out what is not working in our curriculum.

You can see by my extensive curriculum list that I was a little planning happy for this school year. I gave all of us an excessive amount of work. I certainly had HIGH expectations and not being realistic at all. We weren't more than 2 months in when I started to feel the affects of too much work and slowly started adjusting the load.

I started combining subjects. For example, I started counting copywork and handwriting as 2 in 1 instead of doing the two separately.

I noticed that our Bible curriculum is taking only about 3 out of 5 days to complete. Our history is completely Bible-based, so I combine Bible and History together... sort of. We complete the Bible curiculum in 3 days. On the other 2 days, we review the catechism drill, Bible memory and Hymn study right before we begin the history lessons. There is also some geography in the history textbook, so we're going to cut out geography from Easy Peasy for now. Did all of that just make sense?

We have completed only 2 lessons of our science curriculum and realized it's a LOT of handwriting, so we're going to go through a more simple science book that we just have in our home library in which Jonathan has taken a keen interest and save the Reason for Science for maybe next year when both children are ready to write that much.

I also purchased workbooks that cover language arts and math that are a year or two behind their grade levels, but the information is presented in a different way, so the kids' minds are still being worked as they review the info they already know. I use these books on days where I'm not able to teach the children their formal lessons, or if we are traveling for field trips. I am still counting these as school days.

Recently I have purchased the Life of Fred elementary set to supplement math and there are days where I count that as reading as well as math.

All of this may sound a little complicated and topsy turvy, but it has made our school days so much less stressful.

It wasn't until I was watched Just Sew Trish's avoiding homeschool burnout video when I realized that avoiding burn out is exactly what I have done. I can now stop condemning myself for not using all the curriculum I bought for this year and stop thinking that I am short-changing my children and even being lazy.

BTW, I think taking so much time off in November, which we have done, has helped to avoid burn out!




One of the beauties of homeschooling is that we can completely customize our days, our schedule and our curriculum to fit our needs. 


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