I want to speak to you about something that I have been struggling with as a homeschooling mom. Am I doing enough? Honestly, this post is a little therapeutic for me because I am using it to organize my own thoughts and initiatives as I ponder this question.

I know I take our children’s learning very seriously. I don’t want to miss anything and so the question of what is enough is always hanging in the back of my mind. When it surfaces, I often shift into gear and get our engines roaring. We head out of the gate at 70 mph with the goal of mastering everything in every subject. Do you want to know what happens? It goes great for one day. One day! By the second day, I am looking at the agenda with a lot less enthusiasm and I feel burnt out.

One of my goals for our homeschool is for my children to love to learn and have the tools to be a lifelong learner. The picture I painted for you above does not support this goal because when I get tired, I get grumpy. Learning is not fun when mama is grumpy.

So what do I do? I’ve been really thinking and praying about this and this is what I’ve come up with. It’s certainly nothing new but I hope I can simplify it or organize it in my mind with these steps.

Determine Goals

I’m sure you’ve noticed but every kiddo is built with different strengths and weaknesses. Evaluate your homeschool and establish customized goals for your family. Look at what they are good at and where they need a little bit more work. Make a goal for each child based upon what you see. As I did this for our kiddos, I realized I had some common goals amongst all of them. I really wanted to focus on writing and spelling. I want my children to be able to learn or research a topic and then put it into words with well-structured and correctly spelled sentences. I could see they lacked confidence in these areas and so I wanted to focus on their belief that they could do it.

Pray

This step and the first one go hand in hand in my opinion. I often feel insecure about what I am doing and I’m learning to take those insecurities to God. I ask him to show me what I’m missing and how to teach in a way that will impact my child. I’m telling you, He never lets me down. He always guides me toward the direction I need to go.

Make A Plan

Look at your goals and make a plan for reaching these goals. For our family, I write a unit study focusing on these components within the study. Our unit studies are generally geared towards history but I’ve incorporated our writing and spelling into them. For example, when we learned about the Wright Brothers, we wrote about it and learned spelling words influenced by our lesson.

Be Consistent

I think this one is a biggie! Whatever you do, you need to keep doing it. Change doesn’t happen overnight or in one lesson. My plan is to teach our unit study twice a week and it usually takes about 2 hours for each lesson. I’ve been able to incorporate a lot of things into these sessions and then the kiddos often do more research on their own. Every week when we go to the library, they are exploring something we have talked about in our unit study.  

CrewTip: The Concept Behind My Crazy

When you are determining the goals for your family, don’t go crazy. We all have many shortcomings. Try to narrow the goals to three or less and focus on those. Once you’ve mastered them, pick three more.

I’ve been intentionally meeting our goals for about a month now and I’ve already notice drastic improvements in my kiddo’s writing and spelling.  So, I’ve concluded, that maybe I am doing enough. At least I know I’m doing what I need to be doing right now and I will trust God for tomorrow.

Download my free “My Family’s Goals” to help you determine your goals.

Thanks for listening! I feel better and I hope it helps you too!

Will you do us a favor and subscribe to our mailing list?