flip it!

Well it’s the middle of November. If the wheels haven’t fallen off the bus of your homeschool year, they probably will soon. Ours did a week or so ago and that’s what led me to this old trick I’d forgotten.

Flip the script.

It’s a trick I learned while in college in one of my writing classes. When a story gets old, some times you just need to change perspective and tell the story another way. And it’s a trick I’ve used many times in my homeschool over the years, but c’mon man I can’t remember everything all the time.

So, here’s what happened and what I did about it. Maybe it will help your homeschool too. At the very least, you’ll get a good laugh.

My 10th grader is taking a class through a local vo-tech program. She was super excited about the class and loves the topic — interior design — but the amount of busy work is overwhelming. For example, the reading assignments are typically 6-8 pages. No big deal. But then there’s at least 20 questions to answer — in multiple full sentences per question — plus another regurgitation assignment for the same pages. And if that’s not enough, there’s also usually other busy work like endless fill-in-the-blanks in addition to an enriching, useful yet ridiculously tedious hands-on project that she enjoys. Add to this that the teacher gives no feedback at all and you have a very frustrated student and an even more frustrated mom.

The busy work has really capsized our school days. It takes a lot of time with very little return-on-investment in the time spent. There have been entire school days where nothing else gets done or if it does, we rush. I’d prioritized this class work over our other subjects because it has firm due dates with penalties. But, it has just put us both in a really bad moods and school hasn’t been fun nor enriching lately.

That’s when I remembered “flip it.”

So last week, I decided I’d had enough. I told my girl that this class was now getting a back seat. We’d still do quality work but it was no longer the priority. I literally flipped our daily schedule from interior design being the first subject of the day to the last. And what happened was nothing short of amazing.

All of our school work got done last week, including the geography we were three weeks “behind” on. Plus the work got done happily and with excellence. Then when we tackled the busy-work, we were both still in good moods and she didn’t feel defeated because she’d already experienced success.

Victory!

So here’s my suggestion: if there’s something derailing your school day, try tackling it in a different way.

Maybe math needs to be your first subject of the day instead of the last. Maybe you need to do the easy work then the hard, or maybe it’s the opposite. Perhaps instead of doing science on the same day you do art, you need to split them up so the mess is manageable. Or maybe you should put all the messy subjects on one day so you’re only scraping goo off the table once a week instead of multiple times. Perhaps Monday needs to be your slow-and-easy day instead of Friday. What if you ate breakfast after devotions? What would happen if you worked with the littles then the bigs? Maybe nap time can come after the nature walk instead of before? Should you try doing chores before school starts instead of during nap time?

Perhaps instead of a new curriculum or a new chore chart or a new reward system, you just need to flip things around.

The options are endless and this is really an easy fix. It costs $0. Try it and let me know what happens.