If you’re anything like me, you find dozens of great ideas you could use to get and stay organized in your homeschooling and life. The problem is overwhelm! Where do you start? It often feels like you aren’t organized enough to get organized.
I’ve been there. In fact, when I gave homeschooling a try by teaching preschool 14 years ago, I was convinced I had to quit because I was so disorganized.
I was constantly forgetting appointments
I couldn’t find anything
The laundry piled up
I didn’t follow through with my curriculum
The stress made me short-tempered with the kids
Little did I know that homeschooling was the perfect remedy for a disorganized mom like me. I saw how incapable I was of doing what God had called me to do. It didn’t happen overnight, but today people consider me an organized person.
I’ve come a long way, but I still seek ways to make our homeschooling, home life, and work function as efficiently as possible. I’ve noticed that there aren’t a lot of organizing missions tailored to families who homeschool, and that’s too bad. We have specific organizing needs.
If you can relate, I invite you to join me for a year’s worth of challenges that will help us get organized enough to do all God has called us to do.
On Mondays, you can read the post, then do one 15-minute mission each remaining weekday, do an hour session over the weekend, or anything in between. One thing I forbid you to do is beat yourself up for not doing every mission. I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to do every single mission as scheduled! There are more important things in life than organization.
But if we do even a few of these missions this year, we will have a better homeschool than we had last year! That’s something to be excited about.
Please also follow the Organized Homeschool board on Pinterest for up-to-date great ideas for each challenge. Be sure to tell your friends about the challenge, too. Getting organized is always more fun with friends. If you haven’t already heard it, I invite you to listen to the Easy Way to Get Organized podcast on The Homeschool Sanity Show. I share ideas for how to get the most out of this challenge and share my fellow homeschoolers’ and podcasters’ best organizing tips.
I’m looking forward to getting organized with you this year!
Please share your organizing progress, tips, or related blog posts in the comments or on Facebook.
I just love Thanksgiving. Homeschoolers have been busy sharing fantastic ideas for teaching kids an attitude of gratitude–an attitude I could use a booster shot of myself. Here are a few links that have caught my eye this week:
Mama’s Learning Corner blesses us with everything we need to do a unit study on Thanksgiving. We did this one year and even did a Thanksgiving play in full costume. I think I was most impacted by this study as I really pictured what these faithful men and women had endured.
Martha Stewart shares these really cute pilgrim hat patterns that would be perfect for a unit study. Role playing the pilgrims can help kids identify with those who celebrated the first Thanksgiving.
School is a lot more fun when you have everything you need in front of you. Homeschool Creations provides this ingenious way of keeping critical information in front of a first grader. But you could do this for each of your students.
Magic School Bus videos (available on Netflix and YouTube) can be a fun way to change up your science curriculum. Homeschool Belle provides lesson plans to go along with each video.
Buggy and Buddy has created this printable calendar that can not only teach younger students about the calendar, but can be used to plan fun learning activities for the month.
What’s more fun than a scavenger hunt? The truth is, it isn’t always fun for mom if she has to plan it. Rachel Wojo has made it fun for everyone by providing the clues and using Bible verses, too!
After teaching all day, you may be fresh out of creative ideas. My Kids Adventures is a website to the rescue! They offer easy ideas for having fun with the kids that are designed for dads, too.
Homeschoolers spend a lot of time planning curriculum, but don’t necessarily have a parenting plan.
Because I was a psychologist before I became a mom, I thought I had all the answers. Wrong! How I wish I had had a mentor like Dr. Ruth Ann Brinkmann. She is an educational psychologist, but more importantly, she’s a godly mother and grandmother with years of experience.
I loved chatting with her and getting her advice for:
coming to agreements on parenting with your spouse
changing your child’s unwanted behavior
understanding God’s unique design for your child and more!
I hope you’ll listen to the interview on the web or on iTunes and will share the podcast with your friends.
The show goes live at 4:00 p.m. Central time today (10/22/13). I love listening to podcasts via the podcasts app while I get ready in the morning or at the gym. Listening while cooking and cleaning is a great idea, too.
You’ll love Dr. Brinkmann’s book, A Walk through Parenting. It’s a guide to understanding and parenting your child with a form for creating a personal parenting plan for each child.
What advice do you wish someone had given you when you became a parent?
Now that the school year is in full gear for most of us, we may begin to wonder if we can hold it all together until summer. These excellent posts will help.
With so many demands on our time, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Heidi St. John offers up three ways to cut through the chaos and focus on what’s important.
The Aussie Pumpkin Patch’s school room is a wonder to behold. There are so many ideas for putting things in order here, you’ll turn to it again and again for inspiration.
More homeschoolers read Psychowith6 because of my review of Classical Conversations than any other post. And now wonder! It’s an amazing addition to any curriculum. Now Not Consumed shares these creative tips for keeping it all organized and part of the school day.
I don’t think there’s any activity I ran harder from when I was pregnant and homeschooling than science experiments. Raising Lifelong Learners gives us this great advice about making science a part of life rather than a time suck.
I’m going to be honest and say that keeping reading logs for the various freebies homeschoolers can get drives me crazy. The papers tend to get lost around here. Free Homeschool Deals to the rescue with bookmarks that serve as reading logs. Genius!
Are you homeschooling an only child? Know someone who is or is considering it? You won’t want to miss this encouraging article that not only says it can be done, but maybe it should be.
For more hot homeschooling helps, be sure to like Motivated Homeschooler on Facebook, the homeschooling-only page of Psychowith6.
I love writing these posts. I feel like I’m having lunch with my friend, Deb, and updating you on what’s been going on. At least I’m writing to you and not talking at warp speed like I do with her. You can scroll at your own pace! I’d really love to hear about you, too. I don’t want to hog the whole conversation. (Well, actually I do, but I will restrain myself.)
#1 Blogging
August was the best month ever for this blog with page views up 28% from the previous high in May. I am so blessed by that. It just isn’t as fun to write when only your mother is reading (not that I don’t appreciate you, Mom).
In August, the most popular posts were:
Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Being Pregnant – this still makes me laugh, not because it’s a humorous piece, but because I had read that if a pin doesn’t go anywhere in the first 30 minutes, it’s sunk. This pin went absolutely nowhere the first month and now has been read thousands of times. It’s not “viral” by any means, but it demonstrates the power of Pinterest to keep content alive.
The sequel to the above post, this is another pin that didn’t do much at first. Now all of a sudden it’s taking off. Pinning on Pinterest is a lot like putting notes in helium balloons. You never know where they’ll end up!
My favorite post of the month was 5 Lessons Our Foreign Exchange Student Taught Me. If you missed it, I think you will enjoy it. Saying good-bye to Lucas was really hard, but we are so blessed to have established a friendship with his family. Elaina now has his sisters as her Spanish pen pals!
Sadly, I am having to let The Inspired Day go for now
I have some other projects that I feel led to pursue (one of which I will tell you about below). If you don’t subscribe to that blog, I would love for you to read The Last Blog Post. I think it communicates the essence of what I wanted to share there.
#2 The Homeschool Sanity Show Podcast
I am super excited to be hosting a podcast as part of the Ultimate Homeschool Radio Network that will be launching September 19th. I have to wait to give you more details until the website is up and running, but I think you’re going to love it. I’ve been a guest on radio programs for two decades, but I’ll get to be the interviewer now. Please like the network page on Facebook and be watching this blog for details about the show. Have I mentioned I’m excited? 🙂
Every year is a better school year. I’m delighted with how things are going. I’ll explain one reason our schedule is so much more functional in my productivity post at the end of the week. I love our curriculum choices for the year, too. I’m planning to share more curriculum reviews with you because my homeschool readers seem to love them.
#4 Music
I’ll admit it. When I started homeschooling, I dreamed of being one of those families that had all the kids playing a different instrument so they could perform together. That idea was dead very quickly. With as busy as I was having babies, homeschooling, writing, and speaking, music education took a back seat. My three oldest took piano lessons for a while, but quit. Then Caleb took it up again a few years ago with a vengeance. I started to wonder why I had wanted him to play? Then last fall, Sam started guitar lessons. This past Sunday both boys played as part of our youth praise band at church. That on top of Andy starting drum lessons, and giving the youngest three piano and voice lessons at home is making me wonder if we’ll be one of those families after all. (More on the curriculum I’m using later.)
#5 New Recipes
I did manage to get some new recipes made this month. It helped that I publicly committed to making this one on Facebook. It’s from Set Your Fat on Fire Fitness. I really, really loved this. In fact, I ate a LOT of it. The rest of the family, not so much. If you love avocados, you’ll love this, too. If you don’t, scroll down quickly.
Avocado and Tomato Salad 4 cups avocados, diced medium 2 cups grape tomatoes or 2 cups cherry tomatoes 2 cups cucumbers, peeled and diced medium 1 cup red onion, diced small 4 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped 2 teaspoons fresh garlic, minced 2 tablespoons lime juice 1/4 cup olive oil salt fresh black pepper Lettuce (if you want) Toss all ingredients in a bowl and top on a bed of lettuce (if desired) Makes 8 servings Calories 201.9 Total Fat 17.9 g Sodium 10.2 mg Total Carbohydrate 11.6 g Dietary Fiber 5.8 g Sugars 1.8 g
When I think of coffee cake, I think of my grandma. Every time we went to her house, we got to have coffee cake. With those warm fuzzies in mind, all I had to hear was “chocolate” in connection with coffee cake, and I was sold. This recipe is easy and a hit with my whole family. I made it without the nuts and used light sour cream.
HEAT oven to 375°F. Coat 8 or 9-inch square pan with no-stick cooking spray.
2.
COMBINE pancake mix, 1/3 cup sugar and chocolate chips in medium bowl. Add water, sour cream and vanilla. Blend well. Using an ice cream scoop, shape dough into sixteen 2-inch dough balls. Place in 4 rows of 4 each in prepared pan. Combine 1/4 cup sugar, walnuts and cinnamon in small bowl. Sprinkle over dough.
3.
BAKE 24 to 26 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 10 minutes before serving. Serve warm.
TIP
To use Hungry Jack® Original Pancake & Waffle Mix (Add Milk, Oil & Eggs), replace 1/2 cup water with 2 large eggs and 2 tablespoons milk. Proceed as above.
TIP
High Altitude: add 1/4 cup flour to dry pancake mix. Bake as directed above.
Prep Time: 12 min
Cook Time: 24 min
Nutritional Information Per Serving:
Serving Size (1/8 2 rolls), Calories 290 (Calories from Fat 90), Total Fat 10g (Saturated Fat 4g, Trans Fat 0g), Cholesterol 5mg, Sodium 620mg, Total Carbohydrate 47g (Dietary Fiber 1g, Sugars 19g), Protein 5g; Percent Daily Value*: Vitamin A 2%, Vitamin C 0%, Calcium 6%, Iron 10%.
*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
#6 School or Office Supply Organizer
I am so proud of myself. I actually made something really useful from Pinterest. I shared this idea in one of my What’s Hot in Homeschooling posts and got to work. I had no idea how popular these things are until I searched “Teacher Toolbox” on Pinterest. Wow! I spray painted mine brown. The one thing you need to know is that you can’t fit full-size pencils in it. Mechanical pencils and many pens work great, however. Filling this up was a trip down memory lane. I have office supplies I bought 20 years ago and never used. If any of you locals need some gold brads, please don’t buy any. I have enough for several elementary schools.
I’d love to know about the hot flashes you’re having! Let me know in the comments, your favorite social media format, or have your kids tell my kids. That’s always an interesting way to get news.
I’m a Christian psychologist turned homeschooling mother of six. My life can be a little crazy, so I look for sanity-saving ideas to use and share. I hope you’ll read my About page to learn more.
