The post Putting My Productivity Trainings in an Order to Help You the Most! appeared first on Character Ink.

Thirty years ago, Ray’s mentor said, “Sit down with Donna every week and ask her, ‘What change do you think we need to make? What do you need for me to do?'”

He continued, “After you do this for a long time, it will give Donna peace, and she will feel secure that you really care about your family and how to improve it.

He said, “Then one day, you will ask her ‘What do you need for me to do for you?’ and she will say ‘Nothing at all. What can I do for you?'”

Well, that time of my saying “nothing at all” has never happened yet in over thirty years! 😉

But he was right about part of it: the peace and security that come from knowing for over thirty years that my husband wants good things for our family as badly as I do is incomprehensible.

A change a week times fifty weeks a year times thirty-plus years–equals a lot of change. Granted, we didn’t do this every single week of our lives. But even if we made a change a month for thirty years….

Twelve months times thirty years equals 360 positive changes. That is 360 opportunities to make our family stronger. It is 360 times to solve problems. It is 360 situations to improve.

It is 360 painless times to say, “We can do this. We can make changes in this area, and we can make this month better in our home than last month!”

You see memes on Facebook and other places all the time that read something like one of the following:

1. Just do it! The time is going to pass whether you do it (a fitness activity, usually) or not, so you may as well have a good change being made as the time passes!

2. Make the change (again, usually fitness-related). Sixty days from now (or whatever), you will look back if you do it, and be glad you did. If you didn’t do it, you won’t look back and be glad you didn’t!

And so it is with family changes. We all have things to work on in our homes. We need to tweak the schedule so that things run more smoothly. We need to discipline a child differently so that the child’s behavior is changed. We need to remove so much fun or add more fun in. We need to drop things for our lives to have time to spend on/with a certain child at a certain time. We need to take our focus off of one thing and put it on another until a skill is learned. And on and on and on.

However, those many changes can feel overwhelming when we look at them all at once. (I used to make “Master Changes Lists,” so I know what I’m talking about here!)

But what if we didn’t have a “Master Changes List,” but instead we just looked at this week, this moment in time, and we decided to do one thing to improve our family….and what if we really carried out the steps necessary to make the change? And what if once we got that change down pat, we took on another problem area and solved it–and again really did what it took to make it better?

Now that doesn’t feel overwhelming at all–and not only does it not feel overwhelming, but it also feels good–and doable.

We are talking on the Facebook page about how my husband and I kept going–NOT GIVING UP week after week, month after month for thirty years of parenting so far. This is one of the things that kept us going–knowing that we had the ability to change things that were not working in our homes–but also knowing that we didn’t have to do everything all at once.

You can do this! You can have the family life that you want. You can discipline your children properly and in love. You can raise children who have the character of Christ—not perfect, mind you, but virtues in their lives that you know the Lord wants for them. You can have fun in your home, have organization, and develop deep relationships with your children…

…one change at a time…facing one thing today and another thing in another week or month…because even a change a month times twelve months a year equals a lot of change…

The post A Change a Week—or a Change a Month appeared first on Character Ink.

So now that you are convinced that “delighting in the dailies” will help you accomplish your goals, how do you get them started (and keep them going) during the initial stages—when there isn’t a lot of fruit to show for your efforts, and you are convinced some day that you should just forget making dinner and go play solitaire or buy some sort of farm equipment (on the computer…lol)?

Here are some tips for learning to truly “delight in the dailies” and make those dailies a long-term reality in your home:

1. Start out with a few of the very most important dailies—and make these things happen every day for a couple of weeks.

(See “Delighting in the Dailies—Part I of II” here.)

Don’t make a huge dailies list and wake up on Monday morning assuming that the magic list will all happen on that day. At times, my “dailies” (not including the children’s daily chores) could be thirty tasks long. If you are not used to doing certain things every day, this can be very overwhelming.

There are two ways to start tackling your dailies (which will eventually lead to your delighting in them):

a. Start with the four or five most important dailies for yourself and one or two per child and tackle these. Attach them to something that you already do every day (get up in the morning, eat breakfast, eat lunch, etc.). And start carrying them out over and over again. Once this is going well, add more. See my post about making a change a week or a change a month here.

b. Start with the first thing in the morning—and do your morning dailies only (for everyone in the family). (You might do others, but focus on making sure the morning ones are done consistently.) I often give the advice that when you want to change the way your days are going, start with the first hour of the day. Get this hour looking exactly like you want it to look (constantly!). Then move on to the next hour, etc. I personally like this approach because I love to make my day great by getting my morning started right.

2. Find someone who “delights in her dailies” and get a vision for this way of life from her.

Believe it or not, I actually knew several moms (either in person or through seminars/conventions) who were “delighting in their dailies” as many as thirty years ago! And this prompted me to make this a way of life. I could see the fruit of their daily disciplines, and I wanted that in my home as well. A well-run home is a beautiful thing, and we older moms need to teach and help younger moms learn these vital skills.

3. Believe in the daily approach to life.

Additionally, as an incremental type of teacher, I knew that “precept upon precept” and “line upon line” was the way that my children would master their subjects—and that incremental learning comes through dailies. I also knew from past experience that skipping things that needed done all the time in favor of things that either didn’t HAVE to be done or things that needed done less frequently didn’t work.

I had to believe in this approach in order to really carry it out. If you are waning in your ability to carry this out, make a list of all of the benefits to doing the dailies on your list (i.e. new reader will blossom through daily reading aloud to Mom, no more five o’clock scrambles for dinner, etc.). Pull this list out to help you “believe” when your faith is weak (and, once again, Farmville is calling!).

4. Notice the fruit (the real fruit!).

After a very short while, you will notice that something (or more than one thing) you have developed as a daily in your life is REALLY benefiting your family. Note this! If your struggling mathematician suddenly knows his x8’s because math drill became a daily for him, you have some juicy fruit! If your husband happily puts on his clean dress shirts in the morning (instead of the former morning clothing scramble!), then you have fruit. If you don’t dread four o’clock any more but actually sit down and read online articles for a while until sweet angels wake up from their naps, you have an entire fruit bowl! Notice it. Enjoy it. And realize that this fruit is there because you learned to delight in your dailies.

5. Believe that these dailies are truly the most important parts of your ministry to your family right now.

Anybody can swoop in and be a hero once or do something big here and there—and those have the potential to be ministries to your family too. However, when we understand and truly believe that what we do when we get up first thing in the morning is truly a ministry to our family, we will look at our dalies differently.

I know there are entire books written about the ministry of magic of motherhood. And they are right. But we have to do more than believe it in theory. We have to have it deep within us that when we consistently cook with our ten year old every day for lunch, we are doing God’s work. We have to breathe it in, take it in, and know it at that moment. When we lie down at the end of the day, we have to feel, believe, and KNOW that we have fulfilled an amazing calling on our life that day—because we did our dailies, God’s task list for us at this time in our lives.

6. Realize that you have accomplished a great thing.

Have you ever heard about the research for mastery in life? Some studies show that it takes repeating an action ten thousand times to become accomplished in it. Just look at each time that you do something (plan the next meal, do a reading lesson with a child, reach out to your preteen’s heart) as a step towards mastery. It really works. You will become so good at the things that you do over and over and over again!

It is rare to find a “work-at-home” mom who can juggle really well. How many times have you personally heard someone say that she could never do what you are doing—that she couldn’t spend all day with her kids or that she wouldn’t have the motivation that you have or that she can’t get organized without the structure of employment? What we are trying to do here—manage a home well, educate our children, and spend all day every day with kids—is not easy to do. If you continue to improve yourself as a home manager and a homeschooler, year after year, you will get more and more accomplished—and you will soon realize that you have done something very rare and very great.

7. But don’t get smug! 🙂

After delighting in your dailies for a while, and continuing to add more and more important dailies into your life, you will be amazed at the skills you have. Bask in that. It is such a great feeling to delight in your dailies. Such an awesome peace that comes with knowing that you are doing—day in and day out—what you are supposed to be doing. Actually, this feeling alone is enough to keep you going. (While I don’t advocate in living on feelings, there is a calm and peace that comes with doing what you are supposed to be doing—and THAT is a great feeling!) So enjoy it…but don’t be smug! Soon there will be someone else who wants you to help her learn to “delight in her dailies”—and you will be just the gal to do it!

In the meantime, here are some places to learn more about my beloved “Dailies”:

1) Short blog post: Dishes, Trash, Laundry Twice a Day

2) Short blog post on “after the Dailies”: Timely Tasks & ABC Weeklies

3) Video With Outline: Following Through on the Dailies

4) Video With Outline–How I Found My Dailies

Hope these help! Blessings to you as you seek to prioritize your life, school, and home!

The post Delighting in the Dailies—Part II of II appeared first on Character Ink.

If you have heard us speak or read any of our blogs, you have probably heard my stories about how I used to be a “closet lady.” That is, I always cleaned out closets, organized toy cubes, shelved books in order, and made one hundred freezer meals in one day—instead of doing the dishes, laundry, trash, and other “dailies.”

It took me a while as a young mother to get to the point where I could set all of my projects aside—all of the more “creative,” fun, and cool things–in order to do the things that I needed to every day….the dailies.

But once I did, my life was forever changed. You see, it is the daily ins and outs that truly make us successful in homeschooling (and in life!).

Stop and think for a moment about successful businesses. Every day a successful business has multiple lists of things that are done by various departments every single day.   They have checks and balances in place to ensure that these dailies are done consistently. The people responsible for these dailies don’t branch out and do grandiose tasks or launch new projects. The daily people do the dailies—because without the dailies no great idea or new product really matters.

While homeschooling mamas do not usually have someone to take care of the dailies for us so that we can do the “grandiose” (if you do, power to you!), we still need to do those dailies in order to be successful.

What constitutes a daily? For me, a daily was anything in the home that needed done every day—either by me or by someone else. At various times, this could include any or all of the following: dishes, trash, and laundry (see my posts about never getting behind on these again!); morning decisions for evening meal (with some preps if needed); morning routines by all; reading with a new reader; writing with a new writer; Bible memory recitations; morning read alouds; two chore sessions; and more.

Some days, throughout my thirty years of homeschooling, my dailies felt heavy and overwhelming (and never-ending because they truly are!); however, more often than not, they made me feel successful. It didn’t matter what else I got done on any given day. It didn’t matter how many projects were left undone. It didn’t matter how accomplished I was (or wasn’t!) in other areas. Because I did something that is extremely difficult: I did my dailies.

And guess what? Not only did I do them, day in and day out. But I also got good at them! Talk about feeling super successful.

I got up, nearly every morning(!), and did what I needed to do in order to manage a large family, homeschool several children, live a Christian life, and keep a wonderful marriage going strong. Sometimes I even did other things—but, like I mentioned above, it didn’t matter if I didn’t.

Dailies are the building blocks to success. They are the things that feed a family, keep a home in order, build strong readers, instill Christian virtues in our kids, and more. They yield amazing results—over a period of time—without our even realizing that they are doing so.

After a while, I learned to Delight in These Dailies (due to the feeling of achievement and the success they brought about in our home). After a while longer, I taught my children to Delight in the Dailies (which have led to their success as adults today!). And now I am teaching you! 🙂

How do you learn to delight in the dailies when you are first starting to make these tasks priorities in your life? Stay with me! Next week, I will give you some tips in how to Delight in the Dailies!

In the meantime, here are some places to learn more about my beloved “Dailies”:

1) Short blog post: Dishes, Trash, Laundry Twice a Day

2) Short blog post on “after the Dailies”: Timely Tasks & ABC Weeklies

3) Video With Outline: Following Through on the Dailies

4) Video With Outline–How I Found My Dailies

Hope these help! Blessings to you as you seek to prioritize your life, school, and home!

The post Delighting in the Dailies–Part I of II appeared first on Character Ink.

We are two weeks into my grocery fast (see the intro post here), and I already have unique situations and “special” circumstances to navigate. But like I always told my kids as I was raising them to do what they had to do every single day: “Every day is special, but every day can’t be a special day!” In other words, when we look at everything that comes up as an occasion to skip our school plan, not do our cleaning, or eat sweet treats, we will not be successful.

The same is true with my grocery fast. I could easily say a week or so in that I can’t keep it because we’re having movie night with the kids; I need to spend more because some of the kids are coming for Sunday dinner; I need to take some food to my step-mom; I need to make something for our ballroom dance; and on and on….

Or I could come up with some creative options that work for my grocery fast and for the “special” circumstances.

Below are a couple of links to products I use and love. I am an affiliate for Amazon.com. If you click on the links below I will earn a small commission. Thank you for your support of this blog!

So here were my special circumstances and solutions for the first two weeks:

1) Family Movie Night: Stone Soup!

I sent the kids a text through the family thread telling them about the grocery fast (they had been telling me for years to empty my freezers!) and that we would be having “stone soup” for the movie night. They asked what they could bring and I told them we pretty much had it covered except for regular bread (they don’t like sprouted), peanut butter, and dessert.

The older kids knew what “stone soup” meant as when they were little, in honor of the story by the same name in which villagers brought foods one at a time to add to a pot of water with a stone in it—and it “magically” became a soup, we had a tub in the freezer marked Stone Soup in which leftover meats, sauces, and veggies went into after a meal (if there wasn’t enough of these things to have as leftovers or I didn’t have another plan for them). When this tub was full, we defrosted it and made “stone soup.” They knew we were having soup made out of whatever I had in the house!

The party was a great success. Actually, for some reason, everyone said it was the best chili I had ever made. I know that this is unrelated to the grocery fast, but I was happy about that! Oh, and my daughter left her half-filled peanut butter jar, so that is one less thing to add to the list this month!

2) Food to Give Away/Take to Dance

Once a week we go eat lunch or dinner on the weekends with my step-mom. My dad died in the spring, and she has no family but us. It has been hard to continue the weekly visits after my dad’s death (many, many Saturday tears upon leaving her apartment), but I am happy to invest in her as she invested in my dad for nearly forty years. We either eat in her Independent Living cafeteria, take her out, or take food in. She has extra food credit right now in the cafe, so that part was easy. When we go, we take her things she needs, take her out to shop, stay and play games, and sometimes take her food or goodies that she doesn’t make for herself or get in the cafeteria. This was easy enough as we had lots of leftover soup, cornbread, fruit salad, and dessert from our movie party! (And she said it was the best chili she had, had in a while too!)

The next day was a ballroom dance, and I am known for bringing homemade treats or appetizers, so I didn’t want to disappoint! I had a zip-lock bag of frozen peanut butter cookie dough, the aforementioned leftover peanut butter my daughter left here, some chocolate chips from when I made Christmas fudge, and leftover holiday M and M’s. Enter “Cookie Candy Bars”! These are seriously the easiest thing to make and everybody LOVES them. You just press the dough into a 9×13 baking pan and bake it. Then melt chocolate chips with peanut butter and spread over cooled bars. Then crush and sprinkle M and M’s (or other candy). (See my low carb/healthy recipe for this here or the quick, sugary version here!)

3) Leftovers, Leftovers, Leftovers!

After our Christmas on December 30th, we had sooo many leftovers. I sent a bunch home with the kids, but I still had too much food left. I knew I was doing the Grocery Fast, so I was even more conscientious than I normally am with leftovers.

To start with, we didn’t make anything new for the first week. This was tough—we were getting tired of Christmas food! But we held strong (except for making new green beans every couple days!).

I added a couple of pieces of fresh fruit to the sad-looking fruit salad and brought it back to life. Ray enjoyed this as did my step-mom. (I sometimes do this when I’m near the end of a fruit salad but the dressing is still good—though I never do this with a fruit salad containing bananas. It’s just not kind to the eaters!)

By the end of the first week, we cut into shreds (with scissors) the leftover ham, turkey, and roast beef. We bagged these and labeled them “Shredded Beef With Gravy—1 Pound Fully Cooked,” “Shredded Turkey With Broth–1/2 Pound Fully Cooked,” etc. (It’s important to note the state your freezer foods are in if you freeze them in different states all the time like I do.) Looks like we’ll have more Stone Soup soon! 🙂

I usually throw out whatever sugary foods we have after a get together (that the kids don’t take home). Thinking of my grocery fast, I actually threw out all the pies except for a piece or two for me that I had saved for my eating window and several pieces I took to my step-mom for her freezer. However, I didn’t throw the cookies and candy out, I tubbed them up, labeled them, and froze them for the future. I feel like I have enough self-control with Plexus and Daily Intermittent Fasting (IF) that they will be safe there until we have an occasion to use them. (Hopefully!)

4) We Used Some Foods Up!

We used up 3 pounds of ground beef and 3 pounds of chicken breast when we cooked them for the soup on family movie night. I was more careful than usual with the meats—only used ¾ of them in the soups and tried not to make more soup than we could use that night, give to my step-mom, send some with our soup fiend son, and eat a meal or two of it the next week. (As a matter of fact, when Ray came home from work and saw the beef chili, he said, “Is that going to be enough?” He has NEVER said that before!! And we did use it all after we sent some home with the aforementioned son and step-mom.)

But I rationed the meat and kept out ¼ of the ground beef and ¼ of the chicken for us to make another meal out of it for ourselves. I normally would have used it all and just made the soups meatier. That was a win on rationing AND using foods up!

I had eight boxes of various types of crackers! I had bought them when our son came home from his internship, a little at a time, and Ray and I don’t really eat crackers much at all and our son moved in with his brother—so there they were. I’m happy to report that we used two of them on soup night with the fam! (I put out leftover cheese spread from Christmas as well.)

For Sunday afternoon football, I was still in my fasted state, so Ray gathered up all the leftover frozen appetizers from our family Christmas Eve party and baked them all in the oven. This was a win because we often have little zipper bags of different frozen appetizers after family parties—so purposely using these rather than making nacho bar, etc., like we often would, was great! (I don’t watch football anyway, so I went to my room and read while they ate!)

And….we used some frozen veggies! Since starting Daily IF, I have become a bit of a food snob. I really like to make Ray fresh stir fried veggies or roasted veggies, and I really love my fresh green beans. I want to get to the bottom of all of these bags of frozen vegetables, so this was a start!

5) I Only Spent $35 the First Two Weeks!

I made it two weeks without much expense! Yay me! I went to Sam’s and bought apples, oranges, fresh green beans, and Romaine lettuce. I was super excited about that!

However, I had another problem to face in cutting my groceries down to an average of $25 a week—I was addicted to an expensive brand of dry shampoo! I had tried the $4 bottles (several); I had tried some of the $8 bottles, but the only brand that worked with my hair color (and that I could stand the smell of!) was Matrix Biolage Waterless Clean and Recharge Dry Shampoo ($18 a bottle!). And I used at least two bottles a month. I couldn’t use 1/3 of my grocery budget during the grocery fast on dry shampoo! (I have seriously tried so many cheaper ones—and I don’t HAVE to have a certain regular shampoo, honest!) But then I saw a thread on a FB friend’s timeline about dry shampoo and someone said she had tried many of the same ones I had tried and finally found one that didn’t leave white residue and didn’t choke you with the smell—and it was half the price of my normal one. I ordered it on Amazon and loved it! I was able to cut my dry shampoo expense in half the first month of the grocery fast! (The new, less expensive, but still wonderful one is Eva NYC Freshen Up Dry Shampoo.)

So that was my $35 for two weeks of groceries—apples, oranges, green beans, lettuce, and dry shampoo! Oh, and ice…have to have my ice every day for my water since I pretty much only drink water and Plexus Slim—and I drink a lot of water!

It’s been a great two weeks! I can’t say that I feel like my freezers, fridges, and cabinets are going down quickly—but I know they will as I stick to the plan!

P.S. How do you stop buying so many groceries and use up what you have? Any good leftover tricks?

The post My Eight Week Grocery “Fast” – Weeks 1 and 2 appeared first on Character Ink.

I am not big on “New Year’s Resolutions since 93% of resolutions are thrown out by the end of January each year. I have kept resolutions before—doing something every day, like reading aloud to my kids or doing a daily cleaning routine, etc. (I prefer to make life changes a little at a time, like monthly, as described in my Productivity Series.)

However, I decided over Christmas that my freezers and cupboards HAD to be reduced. My husband and I raised seven kids for thirty-four years, twenty-five of those years on one income. I prepped, cooked, organized, couponed, sale-shopped, and cleaned like a madwoman during those years in order to stay on budget and “get it all done.” I had one deep freeze that was collecting ingredients for my next freezer cooking day and another was filled with already-made mega cooking meals. My cupboards were the same.

We became empty-nesters eighteen months ago, and while my shopping and cooking have radically changed over the past several years as kids have “left the nest,” I still haven’t learned how to shop or prepare food for two (much less for two people who eat one meal and a snack a day through Daily Intermittent Fasting (IF)—that is just not much food compared to feeding nine people three times a day!). We are getting increasingly frustrated by our inability to grab what we want or need out the pantry, and my beautiful freezers are hopelessly stuffed. So…..grocery fast it is.

I had to narrow the parameters for what this would look like, not just because I like rules and creating systems, but also because I wanted the grocery fast to be effective. If I fasted from buying canned goods only, I could just buy more fresh veggies and still not empty my pantry any. If I fasted from buying perishables only, I could still not guarantee that I would use all of the frozen meat in my deep freeze. It needed to be significant and clear in order to be effective.

So…..here were my “rules”:

1) Cut Weekly Groceries to $25 a Week

For two months, I would cut my grocery spending down from whatever it currently was (which used to be $150 a week before IF simply because we have the kids over a lot AND I made everything low carb and from scratch with expensive ingredients, etc.). I haven’t really established my new grocery budget with IF, but I’m thinking that with 7 meals a week plus 7-14 snacks/desserts per week (per person) and having “parties” with the kids often, I should be able to settle in at $100 a week for all groceries and cleaning (I buy bare minimum cleaning supplies), and toiletries.

2) Buy Only What We Absolutely Need

I knew this would be tough because I NEED fresh green beans and bananas every week. I NEED to make fresh stir fry two nights a week. I NEED to have Romaine lettuce and Romano cheese for salads most days. Or do I?

I decided that I would focus on what we really needed in order to survive…not what I saw as “needs.” Toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste lettuce, eggs, and apples to start with. Then if I had leftover money, I would buy fresh veggies for stir frying and my favorite salad cheese. (I have tons of frozen veggies I can stir fry and bags of shredded cheese in the freezer!)

3) Make What We Have!

Not making what we already have in the freezers and pantries is what got us into this position to begin with. Keeping the grocery dollars low each week will force me to use what we have for sure. But I also needed to make what we have as much as possible without adding too much to it. In other words, I need to make what we have without adding this veggie or that spice or this sauce to the shopping list. I actually think this will be fun! 🙂

4) Figure Out Ways to Party With the Kids for Little Money!

The kids are all really great about contributing to family parties. However, Ray and I usually make the main entrée, provide the drinks, etc. I will keep you posted on how this goes for us (our first “party” for all will be next week’s Family Movie Night!). One way I know I can make this work is to have the kids bring very specific side dishes (i.e. cornbread for the soup beans as opposed to anything savory or anything sweet, etc.).

5) Make Combination Dishes

For many years we lived on casseroles and combination dishes, using meat as more of a condiment than the main dish. This approach reduces per person meat consumption from 4 to 6 ounces each to 2 or 3 ounces each. But now we are spoiled! We love our meat and potatoes or meat and stir fries or meat and salads. However, I told Ray that I am excited to make tuna casserole and chicken spaghetti again! The point is that we have to cook and eat out of every shelf, refrigerator, and freezer in order to make a dent in our stash!

I will think of more money-saving/stock-depleting approaches as I continue over the next couple of months—and I will share them with you in posts that will be called Grocery Fast Week One and Two, etc. I hope you will join me! And if you have any suggestions for me, please write to me! I’d love more ideas!

P.S. Have you ever gone on a grocery “fast”? If so, what tips helped you get through on budget?

The post How I Planned a Grocery “Fast” for Two Months! appeared first on Character Ink.

When homeschooling moms hear the word “schedule,” they either cringe or celebrate. It seems that there is a division of camps when it comes to scheduling. While those who “celebrate” the schedule might be guilty of micro-managing their children and maybe even putting undue pressure on them, those who ‘cringe” when confronted with the idea of scheduling might suffer from a lack of productivity due to their disdain for schedules.

I have found that you do not have to have a love-hate relationship with schedules, but rather you have to figure out which type of homeschooler you are—one who loves schedules and wants to follow one to the letter or one who doesn’t care for them and would do better with a looser type of schedule that still provides some sense of structure.

If you love schedules, then you will probably do better with a moment-by-moment, or at least hour-by-hour one to guide your day.

If you are “allergic” to schedules, you might find a block type of schedule in which you do certain things in a certain order during certain time periods to suit your time management style. I used a combination of both—but always had the “block schedule” in mind for even our toddlers all the way through high school. I divided our day up into

Early morning

Morning

Noontime

Early afternoon

Late afternoon

Early evening

Dinner hour

Late evening

While I might not firmly make 10:00-10:30 math for everybody, I always knew (and the kids always knew) what to expect based on the block of time it was.

Regardless of what type of schedule you use, there are a few key things to being successful in homeschool scheduling. I will leave you with a few of these: (a) Change the schedule every few months as needed, based on the ages of your children; (b) Write the schedule out and “advertise” it for everybody in your family to see all the time; and (c) Attach things that are really important to you to things that are already in your schedule.

(a) Change the schedule as needed.

I found especially with little ones that I needed to change the schedule to adjust to their needs and my availability. When I had littles, I actually revised the schedule every season—based on how long the baby was nursing at that time; how long the toddler napped; who could do which chores now; who needed longer blocks of school meetings with me; etc. I wasn’t locked into the exact same schedule for the entire school year, but I changed it as the children changed throughout the year.

(b) Write the schedule and “advertise” it.

I posted our schedules on the refrigerator, in the fronts of the kids’ binders, on their lesson plan/check sheets, etc., so that everybody could always look and see what was supposed to be happening in our day at a certain time. The lunch person always knew what time he or she was supposed to be in the kitchen; the laundry person always knew what time laundry was to be done each day. By “publishing” the schedule for all to see, I made it more official—and I could even get Dad involved in helping me enforce it if I had a true, posted schedule.

(c) Attach important things to things that are already in your schedule.

We learned this trick (along with dozens of others) from Gregg Harris twenty-five years ago—and have used it every year since then. He said that if something is really important to you to do in your family, attach that activity to an existing one. For instance, if reading aloud to your children is something you really want in your schedule, attach it to breakfast, lunch, or bedtime—times that are already established in your home. We did this with many, many things—attaching things to existing things until our attachments had attachments attached to them—and our day was one big attachment! 🙂

Scheduling your homeschool doesn’t have to be drudgery with everybody following thirty minute time boxes and nobody enjoying it. Make your schedule work for you and your family!

OTHER SCHEDULING HELPS:

[Video] Wondering Wednesday: Scheduling Q & A

Using a Block Time Approach to Big Work Days

Podcast Handout For ” How Can I Turn My Day From Chaos to Control? From Rowdy to Routine?”

The post Love-Hate Relationships With Homeschooling Schedules appeared first on Character Ink.

One thing that makes it much easier for children to learn chores and household upkeep is for the children to work with you on developing systems. We as moms have a tendency to create the systems that we like in freezers, refrigerators, pantries, toy shelves, bookcases, kitchen cupboards, and more. And then when somebody comes in to do a chore or unload groceries or put something away, it is not done correctly. And we wonder why people keep messing up our systems!

In reality, rather than simply telling children where things go or how you would like things done, a lot of stress is eliminated when you include the children in developing the system. When I was about to reorganize the pantry, I would have at least one child working with me, if not more. As we organized the pantry, sometimes using ideas from the child, whoever was helping me was learning the system from the ground up. When it was time for the child to help put away groceries, it was easier to handle that job correctly. Also, the child learns valuable organizational skills including prioritizing space, utilizing areas to their fullest, considering sizes and stack- ability of products, and more.

When it was time to work on toy shelves, the entire crew and I would sit down and get busy. We would label the shelves together. We would discuss how the Legos will be stored. We made tubs of things together. And the next thing we knew, we had a workable system that the children could maintain. Thus, whenever the chore to “organize the toy shelves” was given, all of the children knew how to do that.

The systems can extend to the kitchen as well. If you always make biscuits and gravy or you always make pancakes, initiate a system for doing those jobs. Type the recipes up clearly. Always have ingredients on hand. Teach the children from start to finish how to handle those jobs thoroughly, and by involving the child in the system, is ready to take it on himself.

We have a tendency to think in the here and now. It would be easier for me to make the pancakes—and much faster—than for me to have a child help me. Or it would take more time to do it with the kids. However, we are not thinking long term when we think like this. We are not thinking of how much family unity and family efficiency we could have by chore training. We are not thinking of our children’s futures—and how we can equip them right here and now, beginning with three year olds putting their room time toys away.

I believed in this from day one with my kids (thanks to thorough training from Dr. Raymond Moore and Gregg Harris), and my kids are all reaping the benefits of this approach today as they (seventeen through thirty-three) excel in their jobs, homes, marriages, and school. Skill-building, and life-skill-building specifically, is a huge part of parenting—and one that we should take seriously as we teach our kids to become diligent workers in home and school.

The post Children & Chores: Create Systems Together appeared first on Character Ink.

Once the training of the chore is completed, the fun part of actually having someone consistently and correctly do the job begins. This will work out much better if you have set up a certain protocol that is followed to be sure that the chores that you have taught are actually completed and completed when needed.

We personally had three chore sessions a day before each meal for twenty minutes or so. We learned this approach from Greg Harris in his early Christian Homeschool Workshop (twenty-five years ago!) where he taught us to attach important things in our day to something that is already in the schedule. It felt natural to add a chore session before each meal.

This worked well for us because we had one person, Mom in the beginning, fixing meals during that time. When we added a chore session to that, it meant that everybody was working at the same time on various areas. It also meant there was a a starting point and an ending point.

Some families prefer to simply have a chore chart in which all the chores are assigned and they just need to be done by a certain time of day. That is another approach. I liked all together because it allowed everything to be done at the same time. It was also easier than trying to track down everybody at 3 o’clock and asked if this was done or that was done. Of course, this can be overcome by creating a chore chart in which the child marks off or moves something after he does it. (Assuming the checking is in place—don’t expect what you won’t inspect!)

Whatever approach you decide to take for your chore schedule, be sure that the chores are done regularly. Check out my blog post about three times a day – laundry, dishes, trash. For us personally, we like to give the daily work to younger children. Daily jobs give the child the opportunity to practice that chore over and over again each day. In this way, the child gets better and better at the jobs. They are also very visible as in you can see if the dishes are done or the trash is taken out. Also, they are needed every day, and generally speaking, younger children are around every day whereas older children might go out to a job or sports or extra classes.

If you have not had a true routine set up previously, the first place to start is definitely the dailies. There is no reason to have the coffee tables all dusted when you can’t walk through the living room. Likewise, it is very difficult to dust the room with clutter everywhere. In that way, I would begin training children on daily chores first and foremost. If each child just learned one daily task every couple of weeks, the daily tasks could be passed out, taught, and completed every day within a month’s time. This would make the school day run much more smoothly and give the children a sense of accomplishment and pride to have completed such important jobs.

→For a complete list of all ages and appropriate chores (including Working With Someone Else lists), see our Age-Appropriate Chores Poster Pack.

The post How to Build Chores Into Your Daily Schedule appeared first on Character Ink.

On my recent podcast episode for the last Wednesday of December, I actually talk about the Daily Duties page first. I did that because I truly believe that Daily Duties are what make us the most successful in parenting, homeschooling, home management, and even entrepreneurship.

So where does the Daily Duties page fall in a simple planner? In The Simplified Planner (get it for free here during January 2016 by subscribing to the blog or newsletter or buy it here for five dollars), the Daily Duties page is a template page that you print off and fill in. (I recommend that you print one off and fill it with all of your Daily Duties as described below, then make copies to use each week. This way, any time your Daily Duties change (and they do throughout a year), you can print a clean one off, create a new sheet, and photocopy that.)

That is where it falls in The Simplified Planner, but it should fall every week in your actual calendar/planner. Let me explain:

1) The Daily Duties is a page that you create with all of your daily must do’s on it. These are things that you need to do every single day to be successful in life.

2) This page can be a daily page or a weekly page:

a) Daily just means that you will use a new one every single day (with the same ongoing daily list on it).
b) Weekly means that you will use one a week but each daily task will have five check boxes before it (one for each weekday), and you will check off one box for each task every day as you do it.)

3) Regardless of whether you create a daily sheet or a weekly one, it should have every thing listed on it that you need to do. Again, I work in categories, so my Daily Duties page was always divided by categories. For example, as a homeschooling mama of many, my sheet had these categories on it:

a) Personal Morning Routine
b) Morning Devotions/Reading With the Kids
c) Oversee Morning Routines and Morning Chores
d) Unit Studies (there were always things on here I did every day–Read biography; read character book; sing hymn; other reading for one hour, etc.)
e) Oversee Noon Chores
f) Littles in the Afternoons
g) Food Preps etc.

4) The point is that if you need to do it in order for things to operate smoothly at your house, it should be on this list.

5) Note that the categories may be time periods or categories/types of activities.

6) Once you have it made, you should print it off and insert it (either with a paper clip or in your binder if you use a three-ring binder) just before that week’s Weekly Worksheet. Open your binder or planner up to this page, and use it to work your mama magic in your home.

There are very few homemakers, homeschoolers, or work-at-home mamas who truly conquer the Daily Duties. There are many reasons for this–not really pinpointing what those things are; feeling overwhelmed by bigger things instead of tackling the smaller, day-to-day tasks; lack of motivation; not having kids help enough so the daily list is truly too much for one person, etc.

But the thing about the Daily Duties list is that once you master it, you can accomplish anything! Once you prove to yourself that you can do what needs done every day–before you let weeklies or monthlies or “tyranny of the urgent” overcome you–there will be no stopping you!

Check out my three chore sessions a day and dishes/laundry/trash twice a day for more insight!

Check out this podcast episode about Using Your Planner/Calendar to Get More Done!

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The post Welcome to a New Year: The Daily Duties Page appeared first on Character Ink.