Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I homeschool. Hopefully we've met before at some of the
leading homeschool conferences in the nation. I also teach all about parenting, good communication
and family relationships through the lens of the principles self government. In this video,
I'm going to be talking about how to schedule your homeschool day.
In this video, I'm going to be talking about the importance of the homeschool schedule, what makes a
really great homeschool schedule, what my schedule looks like and I've got a gift for you in the
end so make sure that you stay with me till then. I homeschooled my children all the way up. So my
four children never went to public school except for extracurricular activities. So one of them was
on the school soccer team, one did some basketball at the high school. One was in the madrigals
group. So the show choir, and did some of the plays, starred in some of the musicals at the
school. But other than that, I didn't have anybody at the public school, but when I was a taxpayer,
so they could go and do those things if they wanted to and some of them did want to.
But I'll tell you what the homeschool journey they had, they would never trade it. In fact,
every single one of my four children, as they have hit adulthood have now said to me, Mom, I am going
to homeschool my children. This was the best thing that you could have done for me and thank you,
thank you for making me so weird. They would say no, I know that's a strange thing for a
child to say to their parents. But my children recognize that they were different in a good
way because we chose to homeschool. They also take personal responsibility for their schedules.
I've noticed as my children have gone off to college and as they've served missions for our
church, they have been the type of people who can definitely jump right into a new environment, make
a new system or a new schedule for themselves, and be very successful with new classes, new people,
new jobs, all these kinds of things. Nothing shakes them, because they're used to living
according to a schedule but they're also used to adapting. So they were raised with a mother who
did have a schedule or an objective in mind. But I also want to really live in the moment person.
I'm the type of person that when I see that it's windy outside, I want to make kites and fly them
with my children. I don't want to sit in the house and read a book right then. So I would say,
hey, guys, it's a windy day, we've got to go outside and make kites and so they had to adapt.
But they did know that there was this schedule that we held on to they kept everything flowing
smoothly for the most part. But I did teach them about the importance of adaptation as well.
So if you're the type of person that doesn't love a schedule, still make a schedule, have it be your
backbone, the thing that you keep coming back to when you don't know why everything fell apart.
But also make sure you give yourself the freedom to live and to play like you want to with your
children, because that's going to be important for them. So why is that schedule so important? Well,
like I mentioned, it gives you something to hold on to, it actually points everyone in the right
direction. And it when it starts to feel like things just aren't going right, maybe the sparks
aren't flying, people don't seem very inspired, in the homeschool environment, you can say,
wait, what comes next in the schedule, and we can just get rid of whatever was happening right then,
because maybe we did it too long or maybe it just wasn't a good fit for the learning at that time.
We need to wait for a year or so before we get to it and we can just move on to the next thing
in the schedule. Maybe if we're reading one book and we're starting to get a little bored during
reading time, then what we can do is we can say hey, let's move on. Now we're going to be doing
this cool activity related to fractions and so I'm breaking out all of the oranges in
the drawer in the fridge and we're gonna see how many sections each orange has as we learn
fractions today, right? Sometimes we just need to do something hands on. Now, one thing that I
did early on, which I think was very useful for me, although not everybody might need to do this
is because I wasn't going to be using a certain set curriculum with my homeschooling, I did want
to have a little bit of a plan of what lessons would be taught. So I went to the local teacher
supply store in my area and I got one of those books that the teacher will plan out what she's
going to teach in each class period throughout the day and I just said okay, for this child,
I'm going to teach this, this, this, this. We're going to make cookies to do fractions or you know,
to do you know, life skills or whatever and we are going to make this map because we're going
to do geography and you know, and I would put some of those little things. I'm going to do a
lap book on World War Two, and we're going to do this page. So work on the lap book.
I might just make a really loose plan every single week. So on Sunday nights, I pulled out
my book and I would make this loose plan of activities, and books and things that I wanted to
read to the children and I would just plug them in. It would take me for all four of my children,
maybe about an hour to do that for the week. But after that, I was ready to go and you know what,
I didn't do everything all the time. But I didn't beat myself up. What I would do is I would come
in at the end of the day, and I would say, oh, well, today, we actually went and collected bugs,
because we found some bugs, and then decided we wanted to collect more bugs. So then I would write
down science, biology, studying bugs, even though originally I didn't plan to do science, biology,
studying bugs. So not only did I write what I wanted to do, but then I would write what we
actually did and then I would put a little checkmark out to the side of it each evening.
And that literally took a matter of five minutes every night. Now I did that for a long time. But
then there was a point where I just stopped doing that, because my children were old enough that
they were now running their own education. That's right, they were running their own education.
Don't forget that you are on the teaching self government YouTube channel. So everything on this
channel is about self government, and people learning self mastery over themselves. So I
actually taught my children self government, this was an important part of the way we would live our
lives. So I'm going to teach you how I taught my children self government, and we're gonna
get into what my daily schedule look like. But before we do, click that subscribe button now.
There are tons of videos on this channel that will relate to your homeschool and they don't
necessarily say homeschool in the title. They are things about your relationship and that's really
what you're doing in your homeschool is creating a good relationship and teaching your children
the freedom that comes from self government. So click on the subscribe button now. So how did I
teach my children self government? I taught them the key skills that they would need for success.
Those four basic skills are taught in this book, as well as in my children's book series. The four
basic skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. Each one of those four basic skills has a skill set attached to it.
For instance, following instructions. You look at the person, keep a calm face, voice and body
say okay or asked to disagree appropriately, do the task immediately and then check back. If your
child knows how to follow instructions from you then when you say I'm giving you an instruction
to do your morning chore, they can look at you, keep a calm face, voice and body say okay, go do it and
then come back, check back and say mom I did that, is there anything else? Then over time they start
giving themselves instructions, they start running their own days based off of their own desired
schedules. These children's books each teach one of the four basic skills to children. This red
one right here teaches following instructions. This green one teaches accepting "no" answers
and criticism. The blue one teaches accepting consequences. Whoa, this one's getting away
from me and this purple one teaches disagreeing appropriately. If your children learn the skill
sets to all four of those four basic skills, that takes care of 99% of their behavioral problems. It
is worth it to take the extra time to teach those skills, it will change your whole homeschool day.
So let's talk about how I schedule my day. Now there are many ways that people schedule their
homeschool days, I've given you a little bit of the background of what's going to come in to my
schedule as I live throughout the day. But let's talk about logistically what it really looks like
in the day. I remember, as an early home schooler I thought to myself,
but what does it look like? And I think what I really wanted was an example of
these ladies schedules, these people that I would see at my homeschool support group.
I think am I doing it right? What does it look like for you? How do you know they're learning,
I want to give you a little tip. They don't always show you when they're learning all the things.
Sometimes it's hard to track your progress. You will see over time, but you may not see it every
single day. So don't expect to see progress every day because if you do expect to see progress
every day, your stress level will go up and that will actually be transmitted to your child.
So the whole purpose is of a schedule is to point you in the right direction. So let's talk about
what my schedule was like. It was very defined, but then also, like I said, open for adjustment
if it ever needed to be. So let's talk about my weekly schedule. My weekly schedule was sometimes
certain things each week. I didn't do every single subject every single day, that just makes the
subjects boring. Why not look forward to them a little bit? So especially when they're younger,
we broke them up. So every single day we did certain things. I'll talk about those in a minute
when I talked about the daily schedule, but then I would break up certain things like Monday would be
math day, Tuesday was science day, that meant we're going to blow something up or
make some sort of a battery out of a potato or, you know, do something like that, suck an
egg into a bottle, you know, all those kinds of things that you do when you're studying science,
then we would have Wednesday's, which would be geography days, Thursday, which would be history
day. And guess what happened on Friday? field trip Friday. Always field trip Friday. We decided that
we were getting so much schooling throughout the week, and that we even did schooling in the nights
with dad when he would come home. It was 24/7. We wanted to enjoy the world. So we made sure
that on Fridays, we went and did something. Whether it was bird watching, or whether it was a service
project, or whether it was going to a certain museum or touring a factory or a company, we did
something exciting on Fridays. And they always looked forward to having field trip Friday. So
every Friday when they were little, we had a homeschool choir that we were part of,
we would go to the choir in the morning and then the rest of the day was field trip Friday.
It was the best as they got a little bit older, we didn't do the homeschool choir anymore,
but we still maintain field trip Friday, and it just became a tradition for our family. Now our
children did homeschool all throughout the summer. We changed it a little bit in the summer but even
when we were camping, we would still read books, and have our morning cannon. So let's talk about
what a morning canon is. Like I said before, you need to have those few things that you're
going to do every day, the things that hold the day together. So I told myself if we do
nothing else in our homeschool day, we will have canon. So canon was how we would measure
our lives just like the canon in the Bible, it measures all the rest of the Bible. This was the
time where we would measure our homeschool day. And we would measure how we were living with each
other. So what we did was we had family prayer, family mission statement, family scripture study,
we did our recitations and our memorization, we memorized a song and a poem every week.
And then I also would take a little bit of time to do a family read aloud every single day.
We also incorporated patriotism. So we would do the Pledge of Allegiance and often learn one of
the songs of our country and there's so many. I wanted my children to have a national identity,
as well as a family and personal identity as well. Forming identity, especially when they're young
is the number one thing that a parent can do and so that canon time was the time to form identity
for my children, I wanted to make sure that I took that very, very seriously. And I'm glad I
did as I've seen what's happened in the world and has helped people don't know who they are,
or what they believe or what their principles are. I'm glad we took that time as a family.
That really was my number one thing. So even if we did canon and then went outside and flew kites
the rest of the day, we would do canon and even on field trip Fridays, we did a canon
sometimes we even did the cannon in the car on the way to the field trip. But canon did
happen and out loud reading if we could to the group and discussion happened every single day.
But as you can see from the way I scheduled the rest of my week, I didn't have to hit everything
else. So after we did canon, then we would study math, if it was Monday, science, if it was Tuesday,
geography if it was Wednesday, you know, spelling, we would add in here in there. But we studied
those things on their specific days. Then after I would do those lessons with the children or those
activities with the children, then we would hit usually about lunchtime. We would have some lunch.
And then they would go and do their independent studies. Every week, we did something called
a mentor session and they would set goals for themselves academically, they would go and follow
through with those goals during their independent study time, and then check back with me at the end
to tell me how they did during those times. Now, especially if a child was what I called a
scholar student, this meant that they were usually older than age 12. They were putting in a lot of
independent study time. So those meetings that we would have each week were very, very important.
Now, I promised you a free gift at the end of this video, and I definitely have one for you.
Years ago, when COVID happened and everyone was homeschooling, I created a new website so most
people know me for the website teachingself government.com where I talk about all of my
parenting stuff, and the things that we unify the relationships, but I also have another website,
and it's called heartofhomeschool.net and on that website, I actually created
free courses that you can go and see even I had a whole free conference during the time of COVID that
you could go and see that will give you free information about how I homeschool. So go to heart
ofhomeschool.net and you will find out so much more about how I homeschool so that you can get on
the track to homeschooling and create a schedule that will really work for you. So go to heartof
homeschool.net today. I'll see you there.