Back to School – Our Routine

  A Day in the Life Week

I wrote a post awhile back about how I am more routine oriented. With that in mind we use the acronym FLOW to order our day.

Progress is born out of FLOW…
We use FLOW as an order to our day.

F – Family Needs
L – Learning Environment
O – Ordered by Routine and Habits
W – Workboxes

With the leading of the Holy Spirit we utilized our family’s needs, create learning environments, establish routines and habits, and utilize workboxes for our school subjects to allow our day to flow with order.

Over the years our family needs have dictated our schedule or routine. We had many years were a new baby came every few years and this changed our needs as a family. I have had to learn to be flexible over the years and know that depending on what “season” we were in as a family needed to be taken into account in our daily routine. If I tried to implement a schedule or routine that did not met our families needs as a whole in that season, we would all be miserable and Mama was stressed to the max - and everyone knows that if Mama isn’t happy, no one is.

One of the reasons that we decided to homeschool was to help our children develop a life long love of learning. We have tried to establish a home environment that encourages learning. When looking at curriculum or tools for teaching the academics, I want resources that will also aid in this desire to learn. I am very visual so I like to “see” what we are learning about. I have many posters, charts and lists posted around our learning environment to reinforce what we are studying. See my post on our school room.

Our day is ordered by routine. Here are copies of my girls morning routines:
     

The last few years we have been working on establishing some solid habits and have included this in our curriculum. I have made habit posters that are posted on our Calendar Wall. I will post a new one every 2-4 weeks. I have also made small icon cards that go in their chore chart so we are reminded to work on these habits.

         

I have made a list of habits I would like us to develop. Some of these are necessary ones and some fun ones we would like to add to our life. I have also been working on changing the term we use for “chores” to “royal duties.” I have shared that our home is part of God’s Kingdom and we all have a royal purpose in helping our King.

 

We use a modified version of workboxes as a way to use our curriculum. Here is our workbox schedule. I have found it works best for us to use this system for our key subjects. I am using folders for each “box” or subject. I will be posting in full detail how we do this sometime in September.

                      

Even though I move better in the FLOW of a routine, I still like schedules and make one each year.  The time frames on the schedule have always been a goal not a slave driver.  I use to have to tell one of my children, “we are not a slave to our schedule,” when she would become frustrated that we were not doing what the schedule said at the time it said it was to be done. 

Now in a perfect world, with a perfect family this is what I would envision our day to be like, but since we have neither of these, it is somewhat of a dream.  But, I like to dream and having this as a goal helps me move forward!!!

We actually had a very light summer school schedule this year which has helped us maintain some routine. We will be starting full fledge after Labor Day.

Check out other homeschooling moms and their homeschool days!

Embracing His strength in this new school year~