Getting Organized:
In your home and homeschool
Do you have a regular planning day? This is when you would plan your menu, plan school work for the next week, review school work, pay bills, make appointments, etc. While these are often the things you procrastinate, each of these activities is important to the smooth running of your home.
On Friday, I spent some time doing these type of “desk time” activities. Planning a menu often stumps many of us. My menu rotation is usually in these emails. I would say that we follow what I put down 95% of the time. There are days when we switch the menu around. There are times when we decide to fix something else. The main purpose of my menu plan is to help me not have to think about it every day. I just have to check my menu plan each morning for that day.
Here are some ideas I have on making menu planning easier for you:
- Work as a team to plan the weekly menu
- Keep it simple
- Teach children how to make a grocery list and help with grocery shopping
- Teach them about budgeting
- Teach them to cook (Then you can rotate who the head chef is each day.)
Reviewing lessons and planning for the next week is also a part of my Friday morning planning time. I keep my lesson plans simple. If a book is divided into lessons, you do not have to specifically write down for them to do “Lesson XYZ.” You can just have a check off box for math. Same for spelling. For reading, you can just write down page numbers. The simpler you have it, the easier it is for you and them to implement. You want to spend more time teaching and less on writing elaborate lesson plans.
You will want to set up a regular time to pay bills based on how often you receive income. I file bills to be paid in order of date due. On Friday, I will pull the next week’s bills and schedule payments. The only checks I write are for our church tithe and our power bill.
Set aside time to check your calendar and set up appointments for yourself and your children. Do the best you can to keep the appointments from completely disrupting your school day.
If you are wondering how I do all of this on Friday morning and teach, I have always used Monday through Thursday as heavy school days for paperwork. On Friday, we do more hands on learning. They also have Friday as a buffer for anything they did not complete earlier in the week. This has worked well for us for many years. They are learning on Friday. It is just not done in a traditional way.
Today’s Zone Mission is to clean under your bed.
Your Home Blessing for today is to empty the trash, sweep, and mop.
My menu plan for Friday is pizza and a salad.
Have a wonderful weekend!
