Organizing, Scheduling, and Managing Multiple Grades

By the second day of school I was ready to pull my hair out.
I was running ragged between our four homeschoolers.

• Tutoring the 11th grader
• Teaching the 4th grader
• Guiding the 6th grader
• Mentoring, teaching, and coaching the 7th grader

By 4:00 in the afternoon I was exhausted and I looked at the day and realized we did not get through half of what I had planned in my head.

That was the problem. All four kids schedules were in my head.
They had no clue what to do, so whenever I became distracted, so did they.

Enter Wonderful Husband. He reminded me that when our oldest (now 21 and in college) was in 7th grade we helped him create a planner. Hubby encouraged me to do the same for the boys.

The result?

• After a few hours of planning, I had all four boys’ school-work mapped out for a few weeks.
• I created personal calendars for each student and organzied binders for each student.

Oh my goodness. What a difference!

I stay about 2 weeks ahead of the boys in planning, so there are no,
“What ARE we supposed to do today” moments.

We are 4 weeks into school, and all of the boys, event he 4th grader get up and pull out their planners and get to work each day before breakfast.

The Planner:

• Gives them control over their day. More often than not, the youngest is working before 7am so he can be done with school early.
• Answers the question, “I am done, what should I do next?”
• Brings me peace of mind!

Yes, it takes me a chunk of time to out lessons in advance and to schedule their weeks. But it saves so much time during the school day.

My next goal is to teach the boys how to plan out their own weeks, but that will take some serious mentoring! By the time they are in the 10th grade they need to be proficient in planning their own days.

How about you? How do you help your days run more smoothly?

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