5 Tips on Creating Daily Rhythms & Our Current Routine
We’re on our 8th week of homeschooling and let me tell you - it took us quite a bit longer to establish a routine this year versus other years. Last year I posted about our “default” daily rhythm (you can read about it here) and walking into this year I knew our routine needed to be different, but I just kept trying to go back to our old ways because I like it so much, ha! Change is hard!
The last few times I’ve posted about our rhythms, I always get flooded with people asking to share our template and I have good news! I finally made them into customizable templates that are so easy to edit. I am so happy you’ll be able to edit the cute text on these and personalize them for your own homes! I have autumn, winter, spring, and summer themed templates available HERE, but, of course, you can utilize them however best fits your needs!
Today, I’m sharing more about what our current daily rhythm looks like, but first, I’ve rounded up a few tips that have helped us establish good rhythms over the years. I hope they’re helpful for you!
1: Build Awareness
The nice thing about creating a daily rhythm is YOU get to decide what it looks like. If you crave structure and routine - you can establish that. If you like laid back and spontaneous - you can make room for that too. If you find yourself saying, “I just don’t have time for…” xyz… Remember we all have the same 24 hours in a day so you get to choose how you spend your time. So, if you’re looking to make changes to your day-to-day routine, it first takes simple awareness of what you want it to look like. You might ask yourself, what do you want to see done differently? Make a list of what is working right now and a contrasting list of what isn’t working. What can you do about the things that aren’t working? What adjustments can you adopt to make things run more smoothly? Write your options down so you have a clean vision of what you’re looking to prioritize.
Once you’ve got a good idea down, pencil it in and try it. I love having a visual of what our rhythm looks like out in the open so we keep ours posted in our schoolroom. But, I went through several drafts before we found a good routine and like I said, this year I changed it again! But, overall, just spending the time to sit down and really think about and evaluate the flow of your day can help. Children do better when they know what to expect and what is expected of them and establishing a rhythm will help you get there.
2: Meet Basic Needs
It sounds simple, but meeting your own basic needs and your children’s basic needs can make all the difference in a smooth day. There are a handful of basic needs obviously, but the ones that are most often neglected or traded for convenience is good sleep and good nutrition - for both parent and child. If I have a whiny or irritable child, the first question I always look at is - how did they sleep? Did they get a good night’s rest? For babies and toddlers - are they napping well? Further, when was the last time they ate? And, were they eating a well balanced meal - one that will support mental clarity and provide energy?
I like to say to start establishing your rhythm around these basic two things. Allow time for morning and evening routines so you can work to protect healthy sleep habits. Children, especially aren’t meant to move at an adult pace so adjust accordingly. Also, plug in meals so you and your children know what to expect - this naturally leads to less grazing and snacking. Meals can also be a good time to attach other habits you're working on. For example, breakfast is often associated with morning chores and self-care. Doesn’t it feel good to get up and get ready for the day? Help your kids learn to take care of themselves too and establish good hygiene habits during these routines.
3. Begin Everyday with Prayer
On the topic of needs, prayer is another basic necessity I believe so strongly can set the tone for our days. Personal prayers, yes, but, even more, family prayers are so powerful. Anytime I lead in our family prayer I always ask for the Spirit to be with us in our homeschool. Every morning is an opportunity to invite Him into our day. I often think, if everything else falls apart, at least I connected our family with the Lord.
4. Time Blocking
The goal with time blocking is that you only concentrate on a single task or set of tasks during a set amount of time - usually within a span of a few hours. It can be an efficient way to get things done because you aren’t trying to multitask - jumping back and forth from task to task. Generally speaking, chunking time and assigning tasks to certain blocks can keep the ball of progress rolling. It also allows for flexibility and also works well with loop schedules or checklists.
For example, I know between the hours of 9 AM - 2 PM we’re working on our school work. We aren’t necessarily working the whole time…we have a lot of breaks in here and I allow an entire hour for lunch (which doesn’t really take that long), but knowing this time is reserved for school helps me not to feel stressed trying to “get it all in.” I don’t try to do other things like housework or cooking or blogging. I avoid scheduling doctor appointments or other things during this time and I have no problem telling other people we’re busy during these times. I’m simply present with my children - learning and teaching and guiding - and I love it. They’re the best hours of my day.
5. Be Flexible
What a blessing it is we can be flexible with our time! There have been some days we totally mix up the routine just because we feel like it. There have also been days where we have dropped everything in order to help someone in need. There have also been days where we go to the park all morning or out with friends and save our schoolwork for the later half of the day. There have even been a handful of days where we just simply have a terrible day so we throw in the towel and start fresh again the next day. There is a healthy balance in all things and recognizing the need to be flexible and adjust will go a long way.
Our Current Rhythm
This year the main we’ve changed is moving our family studies up to first thing in the morning versus after lunch. Everything else is about the same. I love our family studies in the afternoon because, for us, math and language arts are our highest priority so I like to make sure we get those done and then have a more relaxed afternoon. I have enjoyed that we have the afternoon to spend time on projects and go down rabbit holes with our unit studies . However, there were two issues we were running into.
First, doing it this way, my first grader is now completely done with everything he needs to do for the day by the time we break for lunch. We’re usually done around 11:30 so then he can play and work on more interest based projects in the afternoon. He LOVES to build and can spend hours playing with legos or STEM projects. This way he has uninterrupted play time and I don’t have try to bring him back into our family studies.
Second, as my older girls have more and more independent work I feel like we were ending our devotional and then they were off doing their own thing for hours at a time and I missed them! When I approached them with the idea of doing our family studies first, they weren’t sure, but after trialing it - they’ve loved it. So, now we do all our family studies first - including scripture study - and then we break into doing core work. I work with my son in our school room while my twins go upstairs and work at their desks. We break for lunch and then just depending on the day - sometimes they have a little more work they can do and sometime they’re ready to work with me right after lunch. I always encourage them to get everything they can done and then we meet for about 30-45 minutes and finish up any lessons or questions they need help with.
One thing I’ve loved about doing it this way is that it’s made our mornings a little more fun and inviting! I can set out projects the night before and the kids are excited to see what we’ll be working on. It’s just made for a little lighter tone and so overall it’s been a good adjustment for us. Also, if there is a day I know we’re going out on an afternoon adventure, we’ll skip our family studies and go back to doing our core work so we can make sure to get it all done by noon and then go out and play or adventure the rest of the afternoon.
In this post from last year, I broke down what we do during each of these times so if you’re looking for a more detailed post on what we do during our time blocks, Daily Rhythm might be a helpful post to read over.
On a final note, I want to leave you with this excerpt from the book Teaching From Rest by Sarah Mackenzie. It is the #1 homeschool book for moms that I recommend, so if you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it! That quote from CS Lewis is just so spot on and I love the reminder she gives us in the last paragraph…
“Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender. There will always be more you can do. You will never complete your tasks entirely, because just on the horizon is tomorrow, and tomorrow the to-do list starts anew. It is so exhausting—sometimes even demoralizing—to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it...
Whatever is getting in the way of your plan for the day—the toddler’s tantrum, the messy bedroom, the sticky juice leaking all over the fridge and into the cracks of the drawers, the frustrated child, the irritable husband, the car that won’t start, the cake the dog dragged under the couch…whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it’s also an opportunity to enter into rest.
C.S. Lewis once observed: The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.“
We can’t really rest in God’s care until we trust that He will indeed care for us. And that means I can’t teach from rest unless I trust Him with my kids’ education too. I am not meant to take on this task of teaching and raising my children in my own strength, and neither are you. We are, however, meant to recognize every facet of our day as coming from the hand of God. It all passes through His fingers first, and He uses it to make sure that we lean hard on Him. Surrender your idea of what the ideal homeschool day is supposed to look like and take on, with both hands, the day that it is. Rest begins with acceptance, with surrender.
Can we accept what He is sending today?”
It’ll take some trial and error, but I have no doubt you’ll find a good rhythm that works for your home. Happy homeschooling!
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