How To Balance Working From Home and Homeschooling

Whether you’ve homeschooled forever or are bringing your kids home from school for the first time, it takes constant flexibility to balance working from home and homeschooling.

Schedule

For many, the word schedule makes us cringe. Thankfully, scheduling at home can be as flexible or rigid as you like. It’s your schedule, and, therefore, it’s entirely up to you. Start by making a list of everything you need to do each day, including school, job, meals, errands, and activities. Then, estimate how much time you need to accomplish each task.

Some people work well scheduling every minute of their day, and others prefer blocking out hours or just having a list for each day and scratching things off as they go. No matter what, have an idea of how each day will flow.

Distance Learning

The idea of reading aloud by the fire on a wintry day may sound heart-warming, but is it realistic for your lifestyle? Choose what works for your family. If both parents work, you may want to consider distance learning as a homeschooling option. There are many homeschool programs available online, and you’ll only need to keep a few supplies on hand to make it work. With distance learning, everything is done for you, from planning to testing. While you work from home, the kids are learning online.

Flexibility

Is there any part of raising children that doesn’t require flexibility? Probably not. Flexibility may be the number one requirement to balance working from home and homeschooling.

We are accustomed to sticking to a routine schedule in our lives—9-5 for work and 8-3 for school. It’s okay to change that up at home to make things run more smoothly. That’s the beauty of working from home and homeschooling. If your kids are not morning people, maybe you can get up early and accomplish more in the morning, giving you the ability to sign out from work earlier in the afternoon. Then, you can begin school at that time. You can switch up your day in any way you see fit. You can read history lessons over lunch and handle math questions at dinner time. Once children can read, you can assign them stacks of books to keep them busy during the day.

Let Things Go

Your house is a busy one with both the kids’ school and your career taking the center stage every day. Go easy on yourself and let those thoughts of perfection go.

Mealtime might become more casual. Serving cereal or sandwiches once in a while is great and your children would rather have happy parents than gourmet meals and a house full of stress. The laundry may be piling up and the bathrooms need cleaning, but that is what Saturday is for. And if it doesn’t happen on Saturday, that’s okay too! Accomplishing school lessons and keeping up with your job requirements for the week is enough and will pretty much make you superhuman!

Every once in a while, be sure to pat yourself on the back and give your children a round of applause. You are a team and can accomplish great things together.

Sincerely,