I never thought I would get to this place. I’ve always planned out our homeschool year in advance and with great detail, but it just wasn’t working for us anymore. Writing out homeschool lesson plans no longer was providing the freedom that it once was for me and my family. It was weighing me down, causing my children to not love learning and eliminating time for our family each day. After learning to let go of my children’s education and learning to live life outside of lesson plans, it wasn’t terribly hard to stop writing homeschool lesson plans. I am just surprised at how much both I and my children are loving it.
We have never completed every subject every homeschool day, but we did have full homeschool days. Too full. As an OCD planner, I struggled with walking away without completing our lesson plans for the day. I worried that I was letting my children down and not giving them the education that they needed. I felt like a failure anytime that we were unable to complete our homeschool lesson plans.
The worst part was that I was teaching my children that I expected them to be perfect. I was showing them that in order to have a good day it required getting everything done, no matter what. The fact that we spent an hour working to understand a new concept in math did not affect them having to complete their science, history or penmanship lessons. It was on our homeschool lesson plan for the day, so they had to do it.
Not only was I teaching my children to strive to be perfect, but I also was expecting myself to be what I believed was the perfect homeschool mom. I was setting myself up for failure under the disguise of giving my children the education I thought that they needed. I was convinced that having full homeschool days was the only way to ensure that their education would be complete.
When we began following a child led homeschooling method, I found that it was difficult to write homeschool lesson plans because I didn’t know how much they would want to cover each week for history, science, art and music. Still, I attempted to write homeschool lesson plans, but after a couple months I realized that how I planned our homeschool days before wasn’t going to work anymore. So, I decided to try planning our homeschool on a weekly basis and that seemed to work better, but it still wasn’t right. What we were able to cover differed from one day to the next, there simply was no way to determine what our homeschool lesson plans would look like until we were actually done with homeschooling each day.
So, the truth is this…
I stopped writing homeschool lesson plans because I realized that I was creating double the work for myself.
Each week when I sat down to write out our weekly homeschool lesson plans, I would attempt to determine how much school work each child could complete each day. Yet, I had no way of knowing how my children would respond to each day’s lessons or what else would happen each day. Instead of giving myself freedom by having our week planned out, each day I had to adjust our homeschool lesson plans for the week based on what we were and weren’t able to complete each day.
As a homeschool mom, I do not have any extra time to add more work to my day. I’m already taking care of my husband, children, home, online business and family business, I need any extra moments that are available to just sit down for a few minutes, take a hot shower or enjoy a cup of coffee while watching TV with my husband or kids.
If you are finding that writing homeschool lesson plans is not beneficial to you and your kids, don’t feel like you have to write them. There are other ways to ensure that your children complete their school work each year and keep track of what you cover each day in your homeschool. Take time to determine what would be the easiest way for you to keep track of your daily homeschooling and your yearly homeschool studies and do what works best for you!
Why do you or don’t you write homeschool lesson plans?
