Hi, do you want to know the best way to run your homeschool day? I'm Nicholeen Peck. I'm a
veteran homeschooler, I also teach parenting and family relationships all over the world
and in this video I'm going to be sharing with you some of my tips and tricks
that you can use to have the best homeschool days possible.
In this video I'm going to be talking about schedules, the schedules that we used as
homeschoolers because I homeschooled all of my children growing up and I'm also going to be
talking about the ways that you can find your own personal time because sometimes that is
lacking when we're homeschooling our children and it is important that we have time for us too.
I never thought I'd homeschool my children. Seriously never. So I have four children of
my own, I was a treatment foster parent so when I had two children and I was doing
treatment care for troubled teens ages 12 to 18 so I had two foster children in my home
and two children of my own at this time, I decided all of a sudden that I was going to homeschool my
children. Now I was busy. Foster children take a lot of time especially treatment foster care. There's
courts and plus all of the help with behaviors and some of the issues that they're facing in their
lives that we needed to work through, plus toddlers are busy and I had this child that was reading at
age three and he was definitely surpassing what he could do at school and so I knew I really
needed to do something here that was going to be special for him. I wanted him to have time with me.
I originally started homeschooling because he was so far ahead and because when the foster children
would come home from school, I didn't want my child to not have as much time with me because they had
more advanced needs with their schooling so I reasoned if I'm with my child all day then when
the other children come home from school, he can go and play outside and I can help them with their
homework. It'll be perfect. Well after just a little bit of homeschooling, I realized this was something
I definitely wanted to do for the long haul and it was something that changed my life, my education as
well as the life and education of my entire family. If I could just give you the vision of homeschool,
as you are starting the schedule and you're trying to figure out the best way to improve
your homeschool, do not forget the vision because people who do not have a good vision of homeschool
actually have a harder time staying the course and sticking to the schedule or the
plan that they've put in front of themselves. The vision that I held onto for homeschool was
making a certain type of adult. I didn't want just competency with certain things or to keep up with
what was happening at the school. What I wanted for homeschool was I wanted a kind of an adult
that could problem solve, that could connect to other people, that was definitely mature,
that had adult skill sets so that they were ready to launch into the world, that they could analyze
things that were going on, that they had good discernment which meant they knew what was right
and wrong, good and bad, true and false and above all, I wanted them to have good solid relationships
with family. So what I always told myself was that I'm not making perfect children to impress a
school or the neighbors or the in-laws. I'm making joyful adults who know what their mission in life
is and can't wait to fight for it and have solid relationships with God and family, that's what I'm
making which means every day is not going to be perfect, they're not going to be perfect if
I compared somebody's level at this with somebody else's level at this that's not in my home school,
it could look different but that's not the point. The point is the type of person I'm turning out,
that's my product, that's my focus and it doesn't have to happen on anybody else's time schedule.
I was focused and deliberate in everything I did and this also came down to my scheduling.
The very first homeschool conference I went to, the keynote speaker was not able to attend
and so there was a guy who spoke for her instead. His name was Oliver Demille, he had written a book
called A Thomas Jefferson Education and it was talking about different types of education. I was
intrigued by him. In fact that first homeschooling conference was vital for my home school. I heard
key people talk about the real principles of education, not just how to run a school day. Now I
know you want to know how to run a school day and I'm definitely going to get to that but I want you
to know that I developed this understanding of principles in education that changed the way I
ran my school day. Not in this presentation but later on Oliver Demille shared some principles.
They were inspire not require, which means that the environment needs to feel inspiring. If it's
just a check off list, that is not going to inspire every child. My two oldest children,
not inspired by a check off list. My two youngest children, totally inspired by a checkoff list.
If they can go look I did all the things mom, I'm so great, they were inspired but my older children
wanted to discuss the things. They wanted to ingest the things in a different way, they wanted to have
hands-on experience with the things and so it had to look different for them to be inspired which
meant I had to make sure that I was inspiring both types of people depending on what type
of inspiration they need. This factored into the way I was going to be running my daily schedule.
Also he taught a principle of scheduled time, not content. So often when we think of academics,
we think of getting through the book, getting through the curriculum but I wanted my children
to get the information through them, that's a whole different process, that can take time and so what
he presented when he said a good principle was to schedule time, not content. I felt like
that's it. He understands if you can just schedule blocks of time, you can ingest as much as you can
ingest in that time and you don't have to worry about whether you got to somebody else's stopping
place or not so that's what we did. Whether it was 15 minutes of math a day or whether
it was two hours or eight hours of math a day depending on what we felt like the person needed
and what we were scheduling for their phase of learning. Now if you want to understand
phases of learning, that's another thing you'd want to go to that Thomas Jefferson Education book for
because that's a great book for understanding the phases of learning. So anyway, in this
mode of trying to inspire, not require, schedule time, not content, focus on classics, not textbooks,
being a mentor instead of a teacher, having quality not conformity, all these different things that he
was talking about, I started putting together what my school day would look like and this
is what I came up with, that I was going to put first things first. So let's talk about what some
of those first things are. I want to share with you my schedule of my school day but before I
do, click that subscribe button. This channel has tons of videos about parenting, family culture
and really as a homeschooler isn't that what you're doing, is making a good culture so
you're going to want to definitely click on this subscribe button so you do not miss those videos
but there are other videos that come out on this channel related to homeschool that you'll probably
want to see as well. So click the subscribe button now. So here's the schedule that I came up with for
my family. First things first, I wanted to make sure that my family knew, that my children knew
what was the number one most important in their life. Now you remember I said that I was creating
joyful adults who knew what their mission in life was, couldn't wait to fight for it and had
solid relationships with God and family. So for us god is super important, that means we're going to
have a devotion time every morning. We call that devotion time canon because it was like the canon
of the bible, what we measured our whole day to. So what did canon include? It included having our
family prayer, our family mission statement, family scripture time, we would say the pledge of
allegiance, we would sing a patriotic song, we would do a memorization of a poem that was applicable to
helping us better culturally, socially and in our relationships with other people and then I
would start doing my education with the children. I would read them things and we would discuss. So
this started usually around 9 00 a.m. So I woke up early in the morning, usually around five
and I would do my exercise. I actually taught water aerobics over at the city pool so I would go and
do exercise from like six to seven then from seven until nine, I would run errands like going to the
store and I would do some of my own study, that's when I wrote all of the books that I'm known for
was during that time I would read things, I would write things and I would study. And so I had two
hours to myself in the morning. I was filling my bucket. In fact I had more than that. I had three
to four because I would wake up and get ready and go and then I also got my exercise time. This was
huge that I gave myself right off the bat. You want your own personal time, you want to have
your bucket field at the beginning of the day, get up early and you know what I found out? That means
you got to go to bed on time too. So anyway that's just how it works, I would go to bed every night at
10:30 so that I could wake up every day at five and make it all happen again. Now my husband was
wonderful, he didn't have to leave for work until around nine and so that's why that morning could
happen. So during that time, he would help the children get breakfast, get up, get their chores
done, make their beds, clean their rooms, stuff like that and he did all that while I was getting my
own study time and exercise time in because he knew I wasn't going to get that much of it
the rest of the day. So, then at nine we started canon and we would do all the things that we were
going to compare all of our studies to and then I would start reading to the children. So
we usually would read and discuss until lunch. So, I would read a book that we were working on. Maybe it
was Charlotte's Web by E.B. White or something like that and we would discuss it and even do
activities related to it but I also would bring in a focus area of study. So Mondays was math day,
Tuesdays was science day, Wednesdays was history day and so we would bring in these different
studies and we would read certain things from those, books that we would find at libraries
and other places and I bought tons and tons of books. I actually have a very extensive library.
I read more books as a homeschool parent than I ever read in all of my college
and high school and all of my learning you know it's really amazing the education that you get
as you decide to take on primary teacher for your children and that you're going to use
classics instead of textbooks, which was a decision that I made. We do that reading, do
that discussion, do our unit study and any kind of activities associated with that and then we would
do lunch and right before lunch we usually did a cleanup. At this point, there's books everywhere,
the toddlers probably have toys everywhere and so I would say okay everybody 60 second cleanup.
I would count to 60 really slow, they would clean everything up really fast and then we would have
lunch. So after lunchtime was independent study time and this was a time where they would tell
me hey, mom this is what I'm going to be working on for my independent study. So usually the toddlers
and the babies would get a little bit of attention from me and then I would put them down for a nap
and the older children would work on their independent studies. This oftentimes gave me
another hour or two that I might be able to read my own book or work on a project that I needed to
for myself. I really tried not to bring in things like paying bills and some of those things during
that time unless I absolutely had to. I saved those things until the evening when my husband
was around or maybe when the children were out playing. So, after they would report back to me for
the end of their personal study time which was usually around two or three or so, then we would
talk about how they did, they would explain to me, we would talk about different things and then they
would go out and play in the yard with each other or ride bikes in the circle in front of our house
and they had so much fun doing that. At that point that's when I did a lot of my chores
and I would start getting dinner ready and those kinds of things that you have to do as
a family. Then we would have our nighttime routine, occasionally my husband would give me a little
bit more time in the evening like maybe an hour or two if I was working on a big project like writing
a book or something like that and he would play with the children and have a good night life with
the children, not including tv because we weren't a big TV watching family. He would do other engaging
things with them while I would do a little bit of study then we would do our nighttime routine, he
and I would have a little bit of time and we'd go to bed. So you see that's major scheduling and when
I share that schedule with you, I want to tell you something. For some people who are not scheduled,
they're going to be like impossible, I couldn't do it. I am a live in the moment person, I am a fly by
the seat of my pants type of girl but I had a goal. I had a vision for my family, that vision made it
so that I would follow that schedule, that was the key thing. You've got to know why you're doing it,
articulate why are you doing this, what do you want your family to get out of it, your relationships to
get out of it, what do you want to get out of it? If you're going to be involved in
education for a whole year or 10 years or you know however many years, it is 12 years,
don't you want a great education, that's what I wanted. In fact one of the principles I also
learned from Oliver Demille was you, not them. If I wanted to give them a great education, I had
to have it for myself which meant that I had to always be engaging in my own educational journey
as well. Since you stayed to the end of this video, I would like to give you a class for free. This is
a class that actually is presented at a lot of homeschool conferences around the world. It's
called the not so known secret for parenting success. We could change the name to the not so
known secret for home school success, that not so known secret is self-government. There weren't a
lot of arguments and fights in our family because I taught my children the skills and principles
that they needed to govern themselves. So, learn that now, that will make the whole
schedule and day flow better. If the children can follow instructions, accept "no" answers, accept
consequences and disagree appropriately, your school day instantly got better. Click on the link
to the not so known secret for parenting success now and your school days will change even more.