Some days are just not great. There is no good reason why they are bad, they just are. Today was one for me. It wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t good. My homemade bread looked like it was stepped on by trolls, the soup in the crockpot didn’t cook in time, my hair is bad and I swear my eyelashes are trying to blind me. Bad days happen. Unfortunately, when you are homeschooler, you generally don’t have the option of going back to bed and hiding from the world. The world finds you and wants you to make them breakfast.
My advice? Know your limits, know your have to’s and for goodness sake, have a written lesson plan or work boxes or some kind of independent work pre-planned for your kids.
Today, I knew my limit was Trigonometry. I just could not work through an extra set of trig identities today, so we did the minimum and moved on. I knew I could do extra history so we spent extra time on that and Bible and got a little further so we could make up the extra trig later.
When my kids were little, I had folders with quiet independent work in them filled with daily handwriting pages, spelling work, math fact memorization and maybe copywork. On bad days, I might just have them do those things and then we might read extra in our read aloud. I also had math programs like a Life of Fred or Mathtacular that the kids thought of as the “fun, extra math” and we might just do that for math that day. On really desperate days, we might just do math and LA and go for a very long nature walk.
Bad hair days and bad homeschooling days happen to everyone. Having a plan in place to mitigate those bad days will save your sanity and possibly, stop you from having to apologize to your kids about losing your cool over fractions that day.
This great, practical help! Even though I’m not homeschooling, I still need “a plan” for not so good days. Thanks!