Homeschool like a Lazy Genius

Kendra Adachi hosts the enjoyable The Lazy Genius Podcast. On the show, she applies principles from her book, The Lazy Genius Way, to various decisions, scenarios, and topics.  You can learn more at her website: https://www.thelazygeniuscollective.com/. Although she was homeschooled as a kid, she isn’t homeschooling her children right now, so she rarely applies these principles to home education.  But I’ve used many of her ideas in my homeschool and thought I would share some with you.

1. Decide Once.

Decisions are exhausting, so if I can decide just once, I do. This applies to meal planning, curriculum choices, and even daily routines. For instance, my husband has two nights a week when he doesn’t have dinner with us. On one of those nights, the boys and I bake frozen pizzas; on the other night, we eat homecooked burgers and oven fries. These are two brainless crowdpleasers that are quick and easy, and my boys can help, so I don’t have to do it all. 

My morning routine is another decision I make once. I decided a while ago to start my day with a cup of coffee, my Bible, and a small pile of books. When I finish my reading, I take a walk. This is where I am now, but there were years when my routine was focused on the kids’ needs, and I had to get up before the sun to have a moment alone.

After carefully researching products, I can decide once about a curriculum and not change it unless it no longer works. We use the same curriculum for all our kids at different levels. Because of this decision, I only had one company’s instructions to figure out and one program to implement. 

The trick is to Decide Once and then stick to that decision until it no longer functions for you. This principle may take a little more up-front effort as you research and plan, but it is well worth it when your decisions are already made.

2. Start Small.

You don’t need to jump into the full work schedule on the first day. Start with one skills-based subject (like math) and one content-based subject (maybe history). Get a feel for those for a few days. Then add more subjects, a few at a time, working up to your full schedule over a few weeks. Starting with a little at a time is less overwhelming and means not everything is new on the first full day.  

Another way to start small is by using short lesson times and working up to the full load. Maybe math takes 15 minutes a day for the first week of school. Your high schoolers can work up to an entire day’s work over a couple of weeks. Maybe you want your family to develop a habit of being outside. Signing up to spend one thousand hours outside in a year might feel overwhelming. But twenty minutes here and there seems more manageable. Start small and work up to what you want over time.

With young children, all lessons should be kept very short. Their attention span is not long. Break longer lessons into several sessions and rotate between reading, listening, and physical activity. By limiting the time they have to pay attention, they can take in more information over time. If you notice that your kid’s eyes are glazed over, stop. Do something else. Come back to it tomorrow. It’s another example of “a little bit goes a long way.”

3. Ask the Magic Question: “What can I do now to make life easier later?”

This question might lead you to think of things you can do during breaks to make the school year easier. Here are some examples I’ve found helpful over the years: prepare activities for your kids while you listen to a podcast or book or watch TV; make a meal plan and shop specifically for it so that your dinner decisions are already made; stock the school supplies during the sales in July and August, so that you won’t be out of pencils or paper in February; gather as many of the books as you need before the year starts.  

You learn all of these things as you go. The Magic Question helps you think ahead to what Future You will need so that Present You can proactively plan for it.

4. Live in the Season.

I have to stay in the season that I’m in. Right now, I have young adults who are in high school and college. All of them drive, so if they sign up for a class outside of the house, I don’t need to be prepared to transport them and fulfill any parental responsibilities for that class. I’m actively home-educating one high school senior, my middle son is a freshman at a nearby university, and my older son is a college grad and working adult. My husband works outside of our home, and I mother, teach, tutor, cook, and write. It’s a good season.

I’ve had other seasons. 

When I had babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, I embraced the idea that I’d have a break at nap time and be doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and laundering. At least I didn’t also need to teach school aside from lots of play and reading aloud because my troops could make a mess faster than I could say, “Stop!” It was a good season, and it passed.

When I had some in elementary school and some in preschool/kindergarten, we did a lot of school work together, only doing math, phonics, and grammar separately. That arrangement lasted for years until the older one was starting the seventh grade. It was a good season, and it passed.

When I had one in middle school and two in later elementary, I worked with the elementary students separately from the middle schooler. It was a good season, and it passed.

When I had a freshman and a sophomore playing two different year-round sports, I spent a lot of time driving them somewhere and teaching one in the car while the other practiced, and then driving to another practice and switching students. It was complicated. It was a good season, and it passed.

However, now that my boys drive themselves everywhere, I’ve taken on more tutoring jobs because my time is more available. I miss the car conversations, but now we chat at dinner after practice. Even the college grad comes to Sunday brunch, and we all hang out for a while each week. It’s another new season. Do the best you can to enjoy your current season because the season is going to change. Live in your season.

5. Build the Right Routines.

Kendra says, “a routine is a repeat and act of preparation, not the destination” (Adachi 76).

Do not worry so much about what other people’s routines are. Just create one that works for you. Maybe you need a beginning-of-the-school-day routine in which everyone gets ready for the day. Perhaps you need an end-of-the-school-day routine in which everything gets put up. Maybe you need both. Setting a routine for your morning may help direct your attitude for the day, and creating a routine for your evening might help you shut down and sleep better. There’s plenty of evidence that a bedtime routine helps the kids settle down and sleep better. It’s bound to work for adults also.

Do you have a routine for starting school each day? When my kids were younger, we’d gather around the table to start the day with a prayer, a hymn, and memory work. I’d pour my second cup of coffee and help the boys make tea or hot chocolate, and we’d read a bit of scripture, sing a hymn, and start the school day.  Times have changed in my house. We typically all do our devotions on our own as we prepare for the day, but we meet up for algebra with tea/coffee/hot chocolate mid-morning.  

What is currently bothering you? Can you find a routine that will avoid it? That’s the routine that you need to create.

6. Set House Rules.

House rules tame household craziness. The rules we have in our house may be different from yours, but I’m making rules to tame my craziness, and you are making rules to tame yours.  

We have a rule of “No laundry, trash, books, or food on the floor.”  That all seems logical, right? But I did four loads of laundry yesterday because one of my kids was shoving laundry under his bed instead of putting it in the dirty clothes basket. AND wet swim towels were hiding under there too.  GROSS.  What I don’t want: Bugs. Or destroyed books, but really, I don’t like bugs. Therefore, the mess must be controlled, even in the teenagers’ rooms, where it mainly resides.

A second house rule is “No electronics on the bar.” The bar is next to the kitchen sink, and any device on it is in the splash zone. I don’t want the drama of “You soaked my phone!” I don’t want to replace a ruined computer. So, no one can leave their device in the Splash Zone, not even my husband, not even me. 

A third house rule is “No video games until today’s schoolwork is finished.” Work first and play later. Am I an ogre about it? No. However, I have to plan to get my work done. My husband has to plan to get his work done.  So it’s likely to be good training for our students also. Adults can’t just stop during a workday to play a video game without risking some pretty major consequences. 

You don’t need a hundred house rules. Just make the few rules that will serve you and yours well.

7. Put Everything in its Place.

Now, the most challenging house rule to enforce is “Don’t put it down. Put it away.” Now that we are back to hosting multiple dinners and events a month, we’ll get back on top of that habit. Please don’t leave your sweaty socks under the coffee table because you took them off while watching Phineas and Ferb. No one else wants to touch them. You don’t even have to take them upstairs. Just drop them off in the laundry room next time you get up.  This rule finishes up the problems solved by Rule #2 and prevents the drama of someone (ahem, me) emotionally hunting for things like the TV remote or my husband’s car keys. We might have attitude problems to deal with, but I don’t want them to rear their ugly heads because someone moved someone else’s science book. It isn’t a problem if the original owner returns it to its home instead of leaving it on the couch.

8. Let People In.

There is no perfect. You don’t have to have a clean and perfectly organized house to have company. You don’t have to be able to cook like a Food Network chef to host a dinner. You have to decide that your best is good enough and either order pizza or learn to make one or two “company meals.” Those meals don’t have to be fancy.  Soup or chili and bread? Hamburgers? Change-Your-Life Chicken with rice? None of those are complicated. Also, if you make the main dish, you can let your guests contribute also. 

As our children are growing up, we’ve had many backyard gatherings with a couple of other families. The most common fare is hot dogs for kids, chicken salad or burgers for adults, chips, and watermelon. Summertime lunch is made. 

9. Batch It.

Batching refers to just lumping together similar tasks. Like, I bet you try to pay off all of your bills in one or two sessions a month. You don’t pay the electric bill today and then the gas bill tomorrow. Grading is one thing that should be batched in a homeschool. Where is your red or green pen? Have you gathered up all the answer keys? Did you find all of the work that needs grading? If so, you can grade it. Don’t sit down to grade just one kid’s math. Sit down to grade all of the math and other subjects that your kids did that day (or week) simultaneously.

However, another way to batch grading would be to have the kid do the math and then grade it immediately. Instead of lumping all the grading together, you lump a complete subject for one person together. Voila! Math for one kid is completely done for one day. 

Another way to apply batching to homeschooling is to have everyone do the math during the same hour. Of course, this assumes that they don’t all need your direct help to do their math. 

You might organize your day according to what can be done in the same place. Maybe you all sit down in the living room for a little bit and take care of some particular subjects that you store near your chair. Devotions, history, and literature could all be completed there. Then maybe you move to the table to do subjects requiring a flat surface, like handwriting, math, and phonics or grammar. As you can see, there are multiple ways to batch your homeschool.

10. Essentialize.  

What matters most about your homeschool, and what is essential to making those happen? Decide what matters most in your homeschool. Do you have things you can do at any time versus courses that you must complete on a particular schedule? What is your minimum homeschool day right now? Heads up: it will change over time. We do math every day at our house during the 30 weeks that our co-op classes are meeting. Because my students are in high school, they complete their science curriculum on the co-op schedule, so science must happen every day. We do a little foreign language every day because a lot of it is overwhelming and because frequent repetition increases the ability to remember the meaning of the vocabulary. After completing those three things, we look at what needs to be completed for co-op and schedule it.

When my kids were younger, essentializing looked like doing math, reading, and handwriting every day. Some of that practice paid off. (Their script still doesn’t look so awesome, but it’s not for lack of effort.) Our typical day boiled down to the essentials when they were young, which meant that everyone would do their math and copy work. Then, I’d read aloud from a pile of books that included history, science, and stories while everyone listened. After that, the younger boys were free to play, and anyone older than ten would do a little grammar. In this way, we usually finished school before noon, and after lunch, we were free to play, run errands, do housework, visit with friends, and get outside.

Decide what matters most in your whole squad. Obviously, everyone needs to learn to read, compute, and communicate well. But you get to decide how that looks. It may be that your family does science through agriculture: if you have farm animals or raise crops, you’ll learn a lot of biology and botany on the fly, as well as both business and community. If you have a city life like mine, you’ll learn different things. That’s OK. We don’t all have to know how to do everything. It’s just essential that we, as a society, don’t lose any of the skills. 

11. Go in the Right Order.

We must educate in the correct order. If you don’t have the vocabulary to discuss a subject, you can’t ask questions or think much about it. If you don’t know what sounds letters represent, it will be challenging to learn to read. If you don’t know what numbers and mathematical symbols mean, you won’t remember much about math. We present almost all education for younger children verbally. To require a child to read before they know how is ridiculous. It will accomplish nothing for a student to stare at letters and figure out what they are if he or she hasn’t learned any phonics. It would be silly to ask a high school student to figure out chemical equations if they have not completed a year of algebra and learned how to use a periodic table. A good chunk of high school chemistry centers around what information is on the periodic table and how one can use it.

You wouldn’t start a story in the middle, and you wouldn’t read a book backward. So, in all skill subjects, we need to begin at the beginning and work our way through. If you have a ten-year-old child who has never done any math, you should start with basic mathematics and not pre-algebra. 

12. Schedule Rest.

I am terrible at this one. I tend to schedule rest and then get behind on all the other things. Then, it feels like I don’t have time to rest when it’s time to rest. If I plan a trip or something to rest, I have to do all the extra thinking of packing and planning until the trip sounds like a chore. Then, I’m still not resting. I have no advice for you here. I have friends who keep a Sabbath every week. That’s ideal. I’m trying to get there.

When it comes to homeschooling, though, one thing that I find refreshing is that we don’t do any school in December. We take the whole month off—pretty much from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. This way, I can prepare for holiday hosting, play catch-up on business stuff, try to get ahead in everything, and maybe take a break.

13. Be Kind to Yourself.

We have several different social media posts reminding moms to be kind to themselves. Sometimes our Inner narrative isn’t very nice. I know I can get down on myself for not being fun, not dressing as cute as that other person does, being a dork in public, or any other myriad of things. I get frustrated with myself because I can’t take care of everything and must ask for help. The truth is that the job of a homeschool mom is more extensive than anyone else sees. That’s especially true for those of us who are also running businesses or nonprofits on the side.

We have to give ourselves grace because we cannot do everything. We should accept offers of help and not beat ourselves up when we drop the ball. Instead, we pick it up, make appropriate apologies and adjustments, and keep going. Our internal dialogue should be as kind as we’d like our kids’ thoughts about themselves to be.

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