Brave Writer Podcast: Morning Routines that Support Your Homeschool & Family
Welcome to Season 4 of the Brave Writer Podcast!
This season we’re releasing (via audio) our most popular YouTube broadcasts.
We’ll also sprinkle original content throughout.
Episode One of Season 4 is about a favorite topic: morning routines! We explore possible ways to structure your mornings, five things you can do before noon, and the difference between following a routine (liberating!) and enforcing a schedule (defeating).
This is NOT a list of things you need to do every morning if you want to have a good day of homeschooling—it is an exploration of how morning routines really helped our home school, and how they may be used to help you too.
Listen to the Podcast
Show Notes
The Big Morning Routine Myth
No practice that you adopt in homeschool works for all ages, for all time—so there is no plug-and-play system for developing an effective morning routine for your home school.
You will see changes in your family, so you need to be flexible. There may be moments where the routine is stifling, even though it used to give you life.
If your routine doesn’t feel good, if it isn’t satisfying, if it doesn’t support the well being of the family, then something needs to change.
“The morning routine is not your master – it is your servant, and you get to decide what works for your season and stage.”
Schedule vs. Routine
While a routine and a schedule might seem interchangeable, they are different.
A schedule is a planned itinerary, a list of programs or actions tied to specific times. A routine is something that you do on a predictable basis, but that is not necessarily tied to specific times.
For example: you probably brush your teeth every day, but you probably don’t set an alarm for when it’s time to brush; you do it after breakfast or before bed, whenever that happens to be.
5 Tips for a Homeschool Routine
Before your kids can be in a disposition to learn, they need…
- a transition from sleep
- food and clothing
- many and varied books
- table time (in our home, this was essentially anything that required a pencil)
- group games, subjects, or projects
“You need time to wake up the brain through your own pleasurable activities, food, and clothing. You need time to stimulate the mind with quality words, thoughts, ideas, and stories. You need time to engage the brain and the hand on rote tasks that are incremental, progress-oriented subjects. You need breaks for food, relaxation, and using your body. And then you need time for things to do as a group, and that focus on subjects that don’t really slot themselves into the morning.”
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Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!
