The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Hello, and welcome to the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your homeschool. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Welcome, listeners. Today I am excited to be joined by Becca Heath in our podcast booth. She is a fellow family liaison and has some really great information to share with us today. So, Becca, why don't you introduce yourself?

Beka: My name is Becca. I have seven kids. My oldest is going into 7th grade. I have a 6th grader, a fourth grader, a third grader, a second grader, and a two year old and a one year old. And I've been home schooling for eight years now, so we've been doing this for a while.

Rebecca: Awesome. So today you're here to talk to us about scheduling your day, and it sounds like if anybody needs that and has learned something about that, it might.

Beka: Be you, I hope. So.

Rebecca: Tell us about scheduling our day. Do we, as home schoolers have to have a solid schedule to be successful?

Beka: Absolutely not. One of the things that is really good to learn when you're going into home school, especially if you're coming from a brick and mortar, a traditional school, is that you don't have to do things the way that a school does them. So when we go to a normal school, you get your kids there at 730, you pick them up at 330. They have 2 hours of homework. Everything is pretty much set to what your school is doing, and almost your entire life is really focusing on your school hours. It kind of sets the entire rhythm of your family. And so the freedom we have in home schooling is that you get to fit your schedule into your family and not the other way around.

Rebecca: Awesome. So you're saying my schedule and your schedule could look completely different and we could be equally successful on our home school journey?

Beka: Yes. And your schedule might look different this year than it looked last year or that it's going to look next year, and that's totally okay.

Rebecca: So tell me how you get started figuring out what the best schedule for your family this year would be.

Beka: It's going to look a little different than I think maybe people expect it to be, where I'm not going to sit there with my curriculum and try to jam it all into my day and then figure out how to fit everything else. I really again, I want to fit my schedule to my family. And so, so much of me scheduling is going to be looking at how my family is working and our rhythms and our dynamics and how we function the best and getting that set in stone and not really in a good place, and then fitting in all the academics. So the first step, I would say, is you're going to sit back and observe, which is exactly what it sounds like. Take a few weeks and sit back and watch and note whether that's in a bullet journal or on your phone or just in your head of what happens with your family naturally. When do you wake up? When do you go to sleep? When do you naturally gather together? When do you naturally kind of find your own paths and separate? When do you eat? When do you like to get chores done? Another thing that's really important to note is when there's really high energy time or when there's really low energy time in your day.

Rebecca: So you're saying instead of trying to sit down and decide, we're going to do all of the school work this year and this is how we're going to do it, and figure out a way to fit your family around, that you would sit back and find your family's rhythm and then decide how school fits into that rhythm instead.

Beka: Exactly. And sit back and try to find what is going to work for you so that you're not working against yourself and you're not working against what's happening in your household. Because if you sit down with a set schedule and you say, we're going to do math every day at 730, but everybody in your household drags at 730, that's probably a really bad time to do math because everyone's miserable. So looking for those times, that sounds really free. I hope so.

Rebecca: It also sounds like you might need to have slightly different schedules for different people in your family. I mean, my boys are usually up at seven, clocking a mile a minute, ready to go. My girls, I'm dragging them out of bed a while later. And so when they are ready to do math might be different times even for sure.

Beka: And when everybody is having different energy levels, especially if you're wanting to do stuff together as a family, paying attention to that. Because I'm sure you know that if you try to do a family event when those older girls are dragging it's miserable for everyone and you're like forcing them and saying, wake up, smile, be happier. So if you look at that and you say, oh, everybody's not really in a good mood until about 1030, then you know you can hold off on those group family activities until 1030 when everybody's happy. And then it just makes your life so much easier because you're not fighting one or two kids to do reading time or just sit down and do whatever it is that you want to do together.

Rebecca: Once I've watched and observed and gotten a feel for my family's rhythm, what comes next?

Beka: After you've done it for a few weeks, you can write down what your general flow of your day looks like, whatever kind of person you are, whether that looks like it being really structured, if you've done it for a while and you can put times on it, that's great. If it's brand new to you and you just kind of write down a rhythm of we wake up. We eat. We play together. We have snack. And within that. Noting down.

Rebecca: Oh.

Beka: We have really high energy. Maybe right after lunch. Or everyone's kind of grumpy in between morning chores and snack time and noting those specific times so that when you go back and look at it later. You have it written down and you can reference those.

Rebecca: It's really interesting to me how you're noticing you're challenging us to observe even sort of moods and energy levels, because I don't know that I've looked at my family like that before. That when is everybody grumpy or when is everybody cheerful or how maybe kind of in the back of my mind. But I do know, like, when do we eat, when do we wake up, when do we do things? But to pay attention to at what point is the whole family usually perky? I don't think I've asked myself that question before, so I'm going to spend some time thinking about that. So I've written down my family's rhythm. I've spent some time watching and thinking about it. Now what?

Beka: Now you can sit down and think about your priorities for your family and not academic priorities. So we're still putting all of the academic things aside for people that are really schedule based and really want to get those academics done. I know that's hard. Take a deep breath. Don't think about curriculum right now, but think about what you actually want to prioritize, what's important to your family culture, what's important to your lifestyle. And again, this is going to look different for everyone. Some people have a lot of sports scheduled, and that's going to be a priority. Some people have certain classes or certain things that they have to attend.

Rebecca: Maybe some family really likes to get out and take a walk or do something outdoors together before they get going with other things.

Beka: Yeah, if you're going to go camping every weekend, that's a priority, right? You want to put that into your schedule and into what's happening in your life so that it's there. So I break these down into three different categories. One would be pre existing commitments. Those are things you know you're going to do. You have sports that you know your kids are going to do next year. Maybe you've signed up for someone like Jhva classes or HSVA classes. So you know, every Tuesday and Thursday, jordan's going to do Spanish in this morning. That's there already, like, youth groups, bible studies, appointments. Like if you have a therapy appointment or something that you know is going to be there and it can't change. The second thing being daily activities, things that happen every day in your house. And again, that can look different too. If you live on a farm, your kids probably have way more hours of chores than a kid that lives in a city, in an apartment. But that has to be in your schedule, right. Or quiet times. Like for me, quiet times are absolutely necessary for my own sanity. I cannot function unless I get a break from all the talking. And there's seven kids, so there's a lot of talking. So that is in a priority in our daily schedule before I put anything else in. So things like that that you want to do every day and then the last one being good habits that maybe you haven't done yet, but you want to start those before the school starts. So this is again where we're going into what is my family's schedule and my family's culture outside of academics, what do we want to do and get in place before the school year even hits us. So that it's there and it's in our schedule and we're not forgetting about it. It's really important and it's there for us.

Rebecca: The first day of school should not necessarily be about how to clean up the breakfast dishes yes.

Beka: Or even about if you have something maybe you want to do, like reading together every day and that's a priority for you. It's better to do that now and figure out when to do that than to try to shuffle that into this curriculum that you're adding because it's just going to get pushed by the wayside and then halfway through the year you're going to say, oh man, I really wanted to do that this year and it's gone.

Rebecca: I'm starting to feel tense between our family's rhythm and all the food and all of the things that happened during the day. And now we've added in pre existing things and all the priorities. Now what?

Beka: Yeah, starting to feel over scheduled. Take a deep breath. It's supposed to be helpful. So the idea is that you're starting in summer when you don't have all these priorities and so things get into your rhythm and they're not a stress, they're not something that's an extra added thing for you to do. And so you have your rhythm that you have and maybe you've added in the few things or there are things that are already there. You don't have to add in snack time, right? Everybody eats that's just there. But after you've done that, you can look at what your day looks like and you can start to identify when are good schooling times. So you see in these chunks of time, oh, we have from 1030 to 1230 where we don't really do anything. And I've kind of written down that everyone's in a good mood then, so that would be a good time to do school and maybe that would be a good time to do subjects together because everybody is in a good mood. Or oh, I've written down from after lunch to 03:00. We don't really have anything planned but also that everyone's kind of grumpy then. So maybe that's a good time to do separate subjects or maybe that's a good time to do things that people don't really struggle with that comes naturally to them because they're not going to fight it. So you're starting to identify these chunks and these blocks of time within your schedule that you can fit school into there.

Rebecca: So let me take you from there and ask real quick as a working mom, how do you fit into all of that? Where you get your own work hours in?

Beka: That's a good question. I look at that and I figure out when everybody is going to be in a pretty good mood and when everybody's going to be able to do their things independently. And then I can fit my hours into that because I have a flexible schedule. So I have that ability to say, okay, everybody is in a good mood from nine to eleven, and I can give them things that they can do independently from nine to eleven so that I can sit down and do work. But also as a mom for all of this, or a dad or a grandma, or a foster parent, all of these things with the schedule and the rhythm and the moods are not just pertaining to the kids. Like you're the teacher. You have to be happy with what's happening too. So if you have grumpy times or you need a coffee in the morning, don't schedule math when you haven't had your coffee. That's going to make everybody miserable. Think about yourself as well in this.

Rebecca: I know after lunch it's really hard for me to keep my eyes open. So the subjects that the kids struggle with the most, that's not the right time because I get so sleepy for a while that I wouldn't be able to help them be cheerful through a difficult subject. I know that you also talk about the different types of schedules, different styles of schedules, that some of us flow sort of naturally through the day and some of us really want rigid schedules. So how do you address that within the framework that you've already laid out.

Beka: Looking at the time that you have set aside for when you want to do school and then taking into account how relaxed or structured do I need to be and does my family need to be to have peace in our home? And that looks different for everybody. If you're looking at a schedule and you see 715, 815, 915, the German train style schedule and you're breaking out in hives, that is clearly not the way to schedule your day. But if you hear that and that gives you like a settling and a peace, everything has a time that's beautiful, then that's probably a good way to schedule your day.

Rebecca: Something you said in the middle I wanted to circle back to real quick because you talked about what brings peace in the home. And the whole point of this daily schedule is not to cram in as many academics as possible, but the point of the schedule is to bring peace to your family as you're getting these things done and as you're educating kids. Would you agree with that?

Beka: Yes. The whole point is to make sure that you're enjoying yourself and that you're having a peaceful home and that you're getting done what needs to be done. But you're not stressing out about it. And you're not feeling like you're being dragged along by your daily schedule and dragged along by your home school life and that you're a slave to the home school life because that's not how it should be. That's not the point of home schooling. You really have the freedom to make it fit and to give yourself room to live within all that schooling.

Rebecca: And the thing I like about the idea of this daily schedule is that I really struggle with the idea that each day is one little step on the journey, and those add up more quickly than I often am able to remember that that adds up to a lot. And so the daily of it is actually really important because those little tiny chunks each day will take us down the road to where our kids need to be.

Beka: Exactly. Baby steps.

Rebecca: What other tips do you have once you've started to assign part times of the day, or even specific times, two different activities, then what?

Beka: Think about how free flowing you feel like you want to be. There's kind of a continuum within home schooled schedules from the German train schedule. We do math at 715. We do language arts at 815, we do history at 915. All the way on the other side too. We do whatever whenever. We don't want to do math today, we want to go to the park tomorrow, maybe we'll do this. So there's kind of a continuum within that, those being the ends and the middle being you can do block schedules or a checklist schedule where you have a list of things, but maybe you don't have an assigned time to it or a loop schedule.

Rebecca: Can you tell me what is a block schedule? How does that work?

Beka: So a block schedule is where you're setting aside specific amounts of time to do specific subjects. If you think of how a lot of people experience junior high or even high school, where you had A days and B days, where you went for math for a three hour chunk and language arts for a three hour chunk, and then the next day you switched into history for that three hour chunk, or science for that three hour chunk. So you're setting aside chunks of time to do a specific subject, or you can set aside chunks of time to do more than one specific subject. This works really well if you have a lot of kids that have these mom, I need you moments, that's what I call them, where all of them are saying, mom, I need you. Mom, I don't understand. Mom, I can't read this. Mom, I need you. Mom, I need you. And they all need you at once. You can look at the block schedule and say, okay, I'm going to block off the morning block for child A and child B for the subjects that I know that they need help with. And then child C is going to do the independent subjects in the morning, and then we're going to switch and swap. And then in the afternoon, A and B are doing the independent subjects, and C is doing the subjects I know they need help with. And that way not all of them are asking for help at the same time. Or the other example, if we're working and I know in the morning I need to work, that's the time I have to work. So I'm going to block off and say, okay, in the morning you can do language arts and typing and math on your own. I know you can do those independently. So the morning block are those subjects. And then in the afternoon when I'm free, we'll do science and history that I know you need help with in the afternoon. And then that way you know you have that chunk of time where they're working pretty independently.

Rebecca: You also mentioned a loop schedule. Can you give us a brief overview of how that works? I think most of us understand a checklist, so we'll focus on the terms that might not be as familiar.

Beka: Yes. So a loop schedule is kind of what it sounds like. You're listing all of your subjects or some of your subjects, and you're just working in a list. You're working down your list, and then when you get to the end of the list, you just loop back up to the top and start again.

Rebecca: So you might not hit all of your list in one day. You go down the list until your time is up for school that day.

Beka: Yes. And it works really well if you have a variable schedule. If maybe on Mondays you have to end at 300, but on Tuesdays you have to end at 1030. And you never really know when you're going to have to end or if maybe you have children that aren't consistent with their time. Maybe some days math takes them 30 minutes, and some days math takes them an hour and a half. You can use a loop so that other things are not getting missed. So if they're starting with math on Monday morning and then it only takes them 30 minutes, they can jump down to whatever is next on the list. Maybe it's language arts, and maybe then it's history, and then maybe your time is up for the day. Well, if you did that every single day, you're never going to get to science. Every day you're going to do math and language arts and science is always going to get missed. But if you're on a loop and you're doing math and language arts, then history, then science. If they finished history the first day, the next day they just start with science. And then when they finish science, they jump back up to math. So they're going in the schedule and things are never getting missed. Nothing is getting done more and nothing is getting done less.

Rebecca: And you can even take that loop idea and assign it to just pieces of the day. Right. Like if you maybe you have a morning basket and you have certain books that you want to read and you read the first two one day, the next day you might read three and four and then you go back to one and two, and then you can kind of work your way through that. But that doesn't have anything to do with math happens. That's just your morning time when you're sitting together reading through different books, right?

Beka: Yeah, definitely. Or if you want to do it with art, maybe you want to do art every day, but you want to loop around and so you have painting and playdoh and drawing, but you aren't consistently doing the morning. Maybe sometimes you get to art and sometimes you don't. And so when you use a loop, you're always going to the next thing. Another thing it's really good for is within a subject, especially if you have kids that struggle with a specific subject, like language arts. If language arts is just a really big struggle with them and you know. They're not going to sit down and do spelling and grammar and writing and English composition and creative writing and all these things in one day. You can loop it and say.

Rebecca: Okay.

Beka: Today we're going to do half an hour of language arts and you're going to start at the top of your loop and work your way down. And maybe they only make it to spelling and then the next day they go to whatever is next. So they're always getting all the subjects, but they're not overwhelmed with, I have to do 20 subjects of this today. They know, okay, I have half an hour of language arts, I get to.

Rebecca: Whatever I get to and this takes a little flexibility from the parent or the learning coach then. Right. It's a little harder to know exactly where they're going to be in a book by Christmas if you are doing a loop schedule. But you do know you're going to be making progress in all of it.

Beka: Exactly, yeah. So you can't necessarily set out and know, okay, by January 1, we're going to be on page 229 of this. You might not know that. So this would be more for if you're just trying to make progress, if you have learners that are struggling and you're just saying, I just need you to work and get a little bit of this done, or you're trying to build confidence in them and saying you can do a little bit at a time and make progress.

Rebecca: And I've personally always kind of resisted the loop schedule because it doesn't feel quite as tangible as I would like it to. And yet I'm starting to see more and more that because our life is not super scheduled and regimented days can change, and some days there's park days, and some days there's these events that the loop schedule does bring you progress. Even if your day is not always super organized, especially if you do have.

Beka: A lot of interruptions or you do have a lot of busyness, it brings maybe even more progress because like we said, if you have a lot of interruptions, you're always going to be doing a and B in the morning, and then CD and E gets left off in the afternoon. So you might be making regular progress with subjects a and B, but halfway through the year, you look and you realize, oh, we have been busy through subjects CD and E so much this year that they're falling behind. Whereas if you do a loop, then you're always doing whatever is next and everything's getting done.

Rebecca: Some great ideas there to think creatively about our day and our schedule and our kids and the subject, and there's a lot of factors to take in and try to get it balanced, and it can feel really overwhelming. We've observed our family. We have a good idea of our family's rhythm. We've thought through what type of schedule we need. Is it time to put the academics in now?

Beka: You seemed so excited about that. Yes, it's time to put the academics in now. And if you haven't gotten your curriculum, the good thing is you can look at what you figured out, works for you, and then fit the curriculum into that. So if you know that you need a loose schedule and you have a lot of flexibility, it might not be the best idea to buy a curriculum that requires five days a week, 36 weeks a year, for 45 minutes a day, and is really rigid because it's not going to fit into what you need. On the other hand, if you've decided that that's great, then you can look for a curriculum that has that, and then you don't have to do the work of trying to make that work. It's already made for you.

Rebecca: Great advice. Is there anything else that you would recommend to parents as they're thinking about their day?

Beka: Don't be afraid to say to yourself that this isn't working and to try something else. Whether it's now or halfway through the year or even if you're two weeks in and you realize that there's just chaos and yelling and screaming and tears, don't be afraid to stop and say, okay, no, we need to try something else.

Rebecca: And that's not a failure. That's learning. Right, like you've learned, okay, this doesn't work. So now I can take the lesson from that and figure out, so if that doesn't, what would what was the problem with that? So that now I can choose better. Exactly.

Beka: You can look and see, wow, this really didn't work for this reason, and evaluate. Look at it and evaluate and say, why didn't this work for us? What was the frustration or what was causing the issue? And then how do we find something that doesn't have that issue with it?

Rebecca: If somebody is finding this podcast in the middle of the year, do they have to wait weeks of observing their family to take the advice that you've given? So you've talked about how the best way to schedule your day is starting in the summer, taking some time to observe your family. Somebody's come across this podcast and it's October. Can they jump right in? Absolutely.

Beka: Especially if you have what's not working. I would say give yourself a week off. If you're feeling like nothing is working, it's probably good advice anyway to stop and maybe do some less structured academics and give everybody a break. And you can just take that week and think about what's going on in your house. When do we fight? When do we get along? When are we happy? When is everybody angry? That's 90% of your problems with children, right? Everybody's hangry.

Rebecca: I love how real you are about what life is actually like. We're not pretending everybody's going around with smiles and getting along all the time.

Beka: That is definitely not happening in my.

Rebecca: House for sure, because that's half of homeschooling is learning to love one another. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing with us how to schedule your day and some great advice and tips and tricks through that. And I really appreciate you being here. It's such a treat for me to have you in the studio. Since you live in Chico and I live in amateur county, I was really excited to be able to do this, so thank you for joining me.

Beka: You're welcome. And now you know how tall I am, so there we go.

Rebecca: This world of working virtually. You don't know how tall people that's real life right there. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us. I hope that this has been helpful. And as always, if you have any questions, ideas for us, you can always email at podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. Tell us, what do you love about homeschooling?

My favorite thing about homeschooling is the freedom that it provides. And if you're having a hard time with one subject, we can leave off of that for a while and then pick it back up later, and it gives us a lot of time to do things and explore when other kids are in school.

I'm Dallas, and I'm 17 years old. I think my favorite thing would be about home schooling is being able to go at my own pace instead of like, in public school where. I had to go along with the curriculum.

My name is Micah. I'm eight years old. Well, when I take breaks on home schooling, I like to play with my toys.

Thank you for joining us today, listeners, for this episode of the sequoia breeze. I hope that learning more about how to to plan your day has been a breath of fresh air for your home school. I've been your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Please join us again next time.