Post Holiday Chaos: Transition Days

Teaching your kids after a holiday brake is enough to drive you insane. Everything is messy from the holiday rush. We are all off our schedules. The kids are hook on the expectation of fun and exciting days, where not much of anything is required of them. Those days pale in comparison to the highly focused work of homeschooling, which while shorter then public school, is much more intense. Not to mention the change of Daddy not being home, that alone can make us all a little grumpy.

During my 5 years of homeschooling, I have never believe in teaching the children on days when they were not going to learn anything. I might be able to check it off my lesson plan that I taught such-and-such, but I know that very little, if any, information stuck to them. Today is such a day.

Today was my husband's first day back after Thanksgiving weekend, and I should have know better than try to do school today. So instead of going crazy, I stopped, and went over the basics of our daily schedule. The reason being is that without the children meeting certain basic responsibilities, like getting breakfast or brushing their teeth on time, we cannot get our school work done on time. Also, I did have them do some light school work, but very little. Of course, our general rule of no screen time before lunch.

For our homeschooling day to be successful we need to have our rhythm, when holidays, sickness or vacation throw us off our rhythm, all of our spinning plates drop. It takes a day to set aside to focus only on getting all those plates up and spinning again, to get our rhythm on the right beat. It is well worth the time, and is nothing to feel guilty about.