Lesson 3: Catching Up and Moving On
A Master Plan for Success
Once you’ve worked out a plan for catching up, you will need a long-term vision for your school and an idea for making homeschooling work. You have, in essence, taken on at least a part-time job, and this requires huge changes in your schedule. This is especially true for mothers who were home all day without children. Your master plan must factor in housework, cooking, care of other children, teaching, planning, grading papers, and self-education, as well as any medical needs your child has. This can feel very overwhelming at first. Having a plan eases the mind.
Begin by creating a schedule. Remember that nothing you do is forever. You are allowed to change your mind as often as you need to. The only way to create a working schedule is to keep making adjustments until you find one that works. Even then, build in room for interruptions. As every parent knows, life usually refuses to cooperate with schedules.
If you have a medically fragile child, you will need to build in a plan for the days your child is too ill to work. One way to do this is to build up extra hours. We do fun learning over the summer, and, when the children were younger, we also did a half hour of math each weekday all summer. Not only did this help them to remember their math, but it allowed us to bank hours for the future. I recorded the math, family reading, educational outings, crafts and so on in our time book. On my calendar, I marked how many hours we should have had by the end of each month. If we are short, I borrow from the hour bank. When a child is ill, or has too many medical appointments, or a tough therapy schedule, it eases the stress if you can just call off school. This can also be used for children with behavior issues who just can’t work some days, and even for moms who have had enough and need a day off. We all get those!
One of the special challenges parents of special needs children face is that we often spend a tremendous amount of time away from home, usually in the waiting rooms of doctors, therapists, counselors and so on. If we are homeschooling more than one child, those children usually spend a lot of time sitting around those same offices waiting. Create a portable school that you can take with you and work on where ever you are. If you have time, add in the current work your children are doing. However, we often find ourselves rushing to the emergency room or urgent care without warning, so keep the bag packed with materials that might not apply to what you are doing that day, but will serve a learning purpose. For instance, if you have been studying mythology, pack some worksheets or word searches that review all the stories you’ve been learning, create a small board game that two of your children can play, and tuck in a good book. Add pencils, crayons and blank paper. You have an instant school to take with you. After using it, restock it with new materials. A backpack is perfect for this portable school. I usually tossed some food and juice boxes too. Sometimes those doctor visits turned into marathons, when a lab test was unexpectedly scheduled or the doctor found something wrong.
Now that you have a schedule and a backup plan, begin thinking about the long-term aspects of your school. Use the materials you created when you were building a philosophy to help you plan. You listed the kind of school you wanted to have and the goals you set. Now you want to make the goals solid by deciding how to make them happen.
In addition, you should think about what you need to do in case you want your children to return to school someday. What skills do children need in public school? What can you do to be sure he won’t return to exactly the same situation you rescued him from? Even if you never plan to return to the schools, plan as though you might. You have no way of knowing what might happen in the future, and it’s best to be ready. With this in mind, teach your child to take tests, to work in a noisy classroom, to answer disability-related questions and to cope with teasing. Teach him how to explain his disability and help him to know what accommodations he needs. He may have to ask for them himself one of these days.
If you have a plan for the future, you are prepared for the unexpected and you are flexible, you will find that you will be able to succeed in homeschooling in most cases. All that’s left now if the actual teaching, and that is the subject of the next several sections of this course. You are ready to begin!
