Have you ever had one of those moments where you felt like God put you in exactly the right place at exactly the right time? That happened to me recently. A fellow homeschool mom asked me for advice about how to homeschool when it felt like life was falling apart. As she poured out her heart to me I was reminded of my own season of homeschooling in survival mode. If you’re there now, please know that you’re not alone! There are thousands of other moms out there in the same trenches right now and I’ve got some hard-won advice to help!
Lower the Bar
The first thing to do when you find yourself homeschooling in survival mode is to lower the bar. Now lower it a bit more! 😀 I’m only partially kidding there. We have to let go of our high (often impossibly high) standards to make it through. There are two key steps to successfully lowering the bar.
Cut Things Out
Survival mode is not the time for an overloaded schedule. Your goal right now is to take things off of your plate. Be ruthless if you have to! Simplify anything and everything you can in both your homeschooling and homemaking world. Use paper plates. Order take-out. Quit your co-op. Whatever you can do to lighten your load, do it! If you need some help figuring out how to simplify things, check out my Relaxed Homeschool Planning Guide.
Let Go of Guilt
Mom guilt is such a powerful and destructive force! It seeps in when we’re at our most vulnerable and whispers lies into our ears, telling us how terrible we are and how we’re ruining everything. The thing is, those are genuinely lies. Your kids will both survive and thrive in so many ways during this season. Lowering the bar and letting go of the guilt building inside you is going to help your kids learn to navigate the hard seasons they will one day face. It will also give them some room to breathe as your family navigates life in survival mode.
Embrace Technology
When you’re in survival mode you have to accept that you can’t do everything on your own. That’s where technology can be helpful. The top two ways I’ve found it to be helpful are through online classes and educational shows.
Online Classes & Tutors
Sometimes your best bet is to hire out certain parts of school. Whether it’s because you’re struggling to get school done or you just prefer to let someone else teach a particular subject, paying for an online class or tutor can be a great help. Some great options we have used in the past are Zearn and Teaching Textbooks.
Educational Shows
Back when I was in the throes of pregnancy symptoms or recovering from birth, we sometimes did what I called ‘TV school’. Yes, you read that right. On those days I let the TV be my kids’ teacher! It was honestly such a life saver so many times. There are a ton of fantastic educational shows on just about every streaming app out there. When you’re trying to figure out how to homeschool in survival mode, educational shows should definitely be way up there on your list! I even created a great resource for us exhausted homeschool moms.
Simplify Learning
My number one piece of advice when you are homeschooling in survival mode is to keep things as simple as possible. This isn’t the time for elaborate lessons or fancy curriculums. The top two things you can do to simplify things are to embrace workbooks and combine your ages and subjects.
Embrace Workbooks
When I talk to other moms about how to homeschool in survival mode, I refer to that time as the ‘Costco Workbook Season’. We’ve had a few of those seasons in our family. It’s the time when you buy one of those ‘all in one’ grade level workbooks from Costco or Amazon and have your kids do a page or two for each subject most days of the week. Ta-da! School is done. I get that in the homeschool world workbooks are sometimes frowned upon but now is the time to tell that idea to go take a flying leap! Embrace workbooks as amazing tools to help you to continue homeschooling while in survival mode!
Combine Ages & Subjects
The cool thing about homeschooling is we can double things up or do them as a family. In most regular classrooms (especially at the middle school and high school level) every subject is separated. Math, science, language arts, history, and electives are all taught separately. We don’t have to do it that way, though! It will make your life so much easier to combine things. Pick a book or a curriculum that can do double-duty. My Early Modern World and 20th Century World curriculums do just that, covering a year of both high school history and language arts in one! We also don’t have to do one type of lesson with our little kids and another type with our big ones. For our family, I do one science lesson for everyone and then the kids do different things with it depending on their age.
How to Homeschool in Survival Mode
When you are deep in the trenches of survival mode it can feel as though you’re failing everyone in every way. It’s hard and it’s scary and it can make you feel so incredibly alone. I promise you that isn’t true. You are not a failure and you are not alone! You WILL make it through this season and you CAN continue to homeschool your kids. Take some time to figure out how you can change things up to make them work for your family in the season that you’re in!
