My Top 5 Must-Haves for Our Homeschool

Everyone homeschool mom has different things that are necessary for her school days to run smoothly. The beautiful part of homeschool is that it can be tailored to fit your lifestyle. It doesn’t have to look like mine, or your favorite Instagram influencer’s. However, it’s always nice to find resources or ideas to help our days run more smoothly. (Well, as smooth as possible, when you have 3 kids that play sports and your main job is to keep a ranch headquarters and help your ranching husband…) But, I’ve narrowed down my list of homeschool must-haves to 5 things that I can’t hardly have a smooth day without.

1. Bible Reading Plan

I am a firm believer in reading the Bible systematically, and I believe that it is bread for everyday nourishment of our spiritual lives.  Therefore, I need a Bible reading plan that tells me what to read everyday, so that I don’t end up reading in circles, and so that I get a full picture of God in His Word. This is the plan that I use. But there are many plans available here.

2. Meal Plan

I do not do well planning meals at the spur of the moment. I have to do it sometimes, but it’s not my strong suit. However, I have discovered that I do thrive on knowing what to cook for breakfast and lunch ahead of time. That way I *usually* have thawed out my meat, or even prepared some of the meal ahead of time (such as cooking a bulk batch of taco meat to freeze.) It also saves on time, for those mornings that school seems to go on for hours and hours, when you are already mostly prepared for your noon meal, it doesn’t feel like you’re working behind the 8-ball.

3. Planner

Now, I know that there are so many nice weekly and monthly planners available to buy from all kinds of places. They are beautiful and handy. But… I prefer a more journal-type planner. Something that is not dated or separated into days. The reason I prefer this method of “planning,” is that I love to make lists and notes. And I like them to be all together. Because of that, most planners don’t have enough space per day for me, and because I don’t love to have a different planner for school and for my other tasks. So I keep all of my lists, notes, ideas and plans in this journal. It also avoids the waste of not using up every page, because let’s face it, even I don’t get to it every day, and I’m addicted to lists and notes!

4. Clean Kitchen

This one is essential to starting my day smoothly. If I go in the kitchen to turn on my coffee and there are dirty dishes, it just makes me annoyed. It also causes our day to get started late because I have to clean up the mess from yesterday before I can start today’s breakfast. You see the problem there…? I will confess that sometimes I’m lazy and don’t clean the kitchen at night. But I’m learning that it’s always worth the half hour it takes in the evening to clean up all the dishes and wipe off all the counters.

5. Good Night’s Sleep

This one is tricky for those who have younger children, and thankfully the Lord meets us where we are and gives us grace for the days! But for me, it is essential to a smooth day to have had 6-8 hours of solid sleep. While that isn’t always possible, I do try to do my best to facilitate good sleep. Several months ago that I wasn’t sleeping soundly. I would sleep through the night but it was restless and wakeful. So, I decided to try an experiment and not look at my phone before bed. And guess what! It worked. I noticed quickly that I started feeling much more rested when I woke up. A few other things you do to help yourself to sleep soundly is to get plenty of sunlight during the day, workout and/or take a walk, and not eat a big meal in the evening.

I hope you are helped by my list of must-haves for a smooth homeschool day! Let me know in the comments what you must-have for a smooth homeschool day!