The Homeschool Reboot Plan to End Holiday Overwhelm

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Have you ever woken up and realized you might as well not do school today? It’s Thursday, you have two errands left over from Monday and there is still groceries that need to be bought. I feel this way without fail every week in the month of December. We needed a Holiday Homeschool Reboot.

The holidays are a busy time. Family Gatherings, Holiday Celebrations, social events and schedule changes make the weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas a bit messy to navigate. Many years our holiday homeschooling routine would get jumbled up in the busy scurry from event prep and holiday errands.

How can we embrace busy times and still homeschool with success?

I’ve learned a few things in nearly two important things in my decades of homeschooling. Let me share are a few ways we have stayed on track over the years. Any combination of these ideas can help you have a smoother transition over any busy season in your life. The Homeschool Reboot is not just for the Holiday season. Is a big move, or a new child, dealing with long term sickness or job change on the horizon? This reboot can help you stay the course through and circumstance and still get schooling done. We modified our schooling when we were displaced from our home during construction and ended up having a great time.

1. Change Your Schedule

I try to keep good boundaries around my homeschool schedule but, there are times when you cannot change the needs in the day. As my dear friend experienced while caring for her grandmother, there are times when you have to interrupt the school hours to attend to appointments.

When errand days threaten to take over the school week, how can you keep up with the work?

We changed our schedule. Homeschooling has some great perks. One of them is that you get to create a schedule that fits your current needs. We have gone to a four day school week to free up a day for whatever we need. If we have appointments, out of classroom instruction time, or an overwhelming task list, day five (it can be any day of the week, Monday through Friday really) is open to give us more flexibility.

When we choose five days of teaching instruction time, we complete our required 148 teaching days (check your state’s requirements) for the state of Iowa. If we move to a four day week, that means we will need to schedule 37 weeks of hands on instruction time. This still gives us fifteen weeks for breaks.

If we work for three weeks and then take a week off all year long, we still have three weeks for a long vacation or holiday break too. What I am saying is, you have a lot more breathing room that you realize. Use it to your advantage, do your kids love to do a little reading on Saturdays? Do you “electives” on the weekend and make them count for school. Your family could school six months on and six months off. At six days a week you would have your 148 days of hands on instruction time done in as little as 25 weeks.

No matter where you are right now, you can, and will, get the work in that you need. You might simply need to change the time frame to fit your current pace.

2. Change Your Workload

After several years of homeschool Holiday season burnout, I knew we needed to make a change. Not only do the interruptions of the festivities take a toll on our productivity, but in the last few years we have had college kids move home over winter break. The kids love having their siblings home, but it changes the dynamic of the household pretty drastically. School always suffers. I get frustrated when I imagine our summer break getting further and further away.

What can you do when you can get everything in?

Who said you had to do everything in one day for it to count as school? Last year for the season that the college kids were home, we declared it independent studies and explorative class season.

Say What?

It seems like we never have enough time to dig into electives like we want to. With a big family it is hard to give my attention to everyone if the all need instructions or help with logging into programs. Electives should free me up, but in reality they are every bit as teaching intensive and often more so.

How did we make room for electives and make December a productive month in our homeschool? We had each child choose something they wanted to learn and found a way to access the information for them to explore the idea. Instead of trying to cram in all subjects, we did math and reading in the mornings and then spent the remaining few hours dedicated to learning about their interests.

What can Holiday Homeschooling look like?

• Guitar lessons with time to actually practice instead of the few frantic hours the night before
• A table littered with art supplies that doesn’t have to get put away for science class to start
• Game school with the coding computer and a new program that teaches with Minecraft
• Making movies with the Stop Motion program you bought but never had time to use
• Digging into the craft bin and seeing what you can make
• Putting on a play for the Holidays
• Family time and Creativity without the stress