7 Sanity-Saving Tips for Working Homeschool Moms

Hello! Welcome to the new and improved Work Life Glue Podcast! I am reviving this podcast that was dead and coming back with a new focus! This podcast is dedicated to helping working homeschool moms balance the demands of motherhood with homeschool and work as well as helping moms who want to homeschool find a way to earn a living while home since that’s a huge barricade keeping many moms from homeschooling! There will be interviews with fellow working homeschool moms and lots of tips being thrown your way so I would love if you would subscribe to this podcast!

If you are new, HI! I’m Sarah! I’m the mom of 3 girls, currently aged 8, 6, and 3. So, a third grade, kindergartener, and preschooler. I’ve been homeschooling technically for 3 years, but I ran an in home daycare for 5 years starting when my oldest was a baby, so I’ve always been working and educating my kids from home besides the year 2020 when my oldest did ¾ of a year of public school when she wasn’t distance learning. I currently run a daycare program before and after schools (on no school days, etc.) in our home and then run my online business in the nooks and crannies of my day, so I’m working about 6 hours each day in addition to other pockets of time I find throughout the week.

I’ve been sharing working mom tips, intentional motherhood, and home education ideas the entire time I’ve been a mom on Youtube and mainly Instagram. I narrowed my focus more recently to really niche down and give a voice to working homeschool moms because I hear SO many people say they can’t homeschool because they need to work! I also hear my friends who do work and homeschool cry out to me for help because it can be overwhelming at times! So, although I don’t have a magic pill to take to make it all work out and every day to be perfectly peaceful, I do have lots of tips, encouragement, systems, routines, and ideas to share with you!

I go live most weeks on Instagram and will be turning those lives into podcast episodes for those of you who don’t like to watch/listen on IG, but I’ll also be putting out exclusive podcast-only episodes every week as well! I share a ton of behind the scenes and extra tips and ideas on Instagram though, so make sure you follow me there @worklifeglue!

So, to kick off this first podcast revival episode, I just want to share 7 of my tried and true tips for balancing work with homeschool.

Make bulk breakfasts on the weekend.

Years ago, I wanted more homemade breakfasts but didn’t have a lot of time in the mornings. I also didn’t have a lot of time on the weekends to prep a bunch. So I did some strategizing and realized if I start now and make one large breakfast on the weekend and freeze what we don’t eat that day and then I do that every weekend, by the end of the first month, I now have a cycle of 4 different homemade breakfasts I can pull out during the week to heat up for my kids. So, basically, 4 days of frozen made-ahead breakfasts, one morning prepping and that eating that meal, so that just leaves 2 extra breakfasts to come up with. We will do things like toast, parfaits, smoothies, bagels, or cereal for those extra two days! Easy peasy!

Get kids involved in the cleaning & clean when they are around.

Like any sane mom, I would MUCH rather clean without my kids around. It gets done faster, it gets done better, and it’s actually somewhat therapeutic to clean without my kids. HOWEVER, I only have a couple precious hours a day that they are asleep and I would much rather utilize that time for things like working and time to myself.

So, I do 90% of my cleaning when my kids are around and when possible, I have them help. I do things like sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, mopping, cleaning bathrooms, laundry, tidying, etc. while they are around me and often helping.

The only thing I do when they are not around and typically will do on the weekends here and there when my husband can take the kids to do something fun is deep organization where I will like take everything out of the cupboard and organize and clean. I actually need to be able to think and make tons of decisions and have my piles stay where I put them and with a 3 year old that just can’t all happen with her actively trying to help me.

Implement a daily (or recurring) quiet time for everyone.

This will differ depending on your job/business and what your days look like, but ever since I did full-day in-home daycare, a dedicated nap time was built into our day and that just continued after the daycare closed and my kids got older. Right now, only my youngest daughter naps but that chunk of time in the middle of the day from about 12:3-2:30/3 is quiet time.

My older daughters play until about 2 (so for about an hour and a half) and they do things like independent reading, piano practice, play with Legos, do crafts, build forts and play outside.

We have screen time from about 2-3 when my youngest is usually up. They will play educational games for 20 minutes and then can play other games or watch approved shows the rest of the time while I finish up work.

During that time, I do the bulk of my work (record podcast episodes, go live, write or respond to emails, make content, work on products, etc.

Homeschool 4 days a week.

Trying to fit in work and homeschool can be complicated, so I highly recommend following a 4-day homeschool curriculum. You an obviously follow a 5 day but I know for me, I tried to cram the 5 days into 4 days or I felt like we were missing out by not doing the 5th day and then it led to guilt which I don’t need any more of!

We currently use Playful Pioneers from Peaceful Press as well as The Good and the Beautiful which all can be done 4 days a week.

I actually split the 4 days over 5 days. My girls go to my parents/ house one day a week for a few hours, so on that day we just do our family subjects (more on that later in this episodes) and then one day a week we have co-op or try to go on nature hikes with our friends so on those days we just do our independent subjects, so it’s still 4 days but split over 5 days.

Group your kids in as many subjects as possible.

The beauty and curse of homeschooling is that you have kids who weren’t all born at the exact same time. This is beautiful for many reasons I can go into in a different episode but it can be a curse when it comes to deciding how and what you will be teaching your kids.

The first two years of our homeschool journey, I used a beautiful Charlotte Mason-inspired curriculum because I was just really educating my oldest daughter. However, now that my middle daughter is an older kindergartener, I didn’t want to have to double the length of our homeschool day to run two different guides – one for each of them.

So, I decided to look for a curriculum that combined our kids. This is totally doable especially in the younger ages. We use Peaceful Press and could easily continue doing this for another 3 years.

My daughters are grouped for literature, calendar work, picture study, music, geography, history, practical skills, and science. They do handwriting, typing, spelling, math, independent reading, and phonics separately but only math and phonics do they need one-on-one help with from me, so the rest they can do truly independently and as they get older, they can take on more on their own.

Grouping them saves us SO much time and honestly has brought out what I desired the most in choosing to homeschool: activities and discussions as a family

Use time blocks to guide your day.

Time blocking is truly the one thing that I could not live without as a working homeschool mom. I will do whole episodes on this I’m sure, but by blocking out my day into different blocks of time, I know exactly when certain things are happening. This allows me to balance way more than the average person without feeling super overwhelmed all the time because I know when my work tasks are happening, cleaning tasks are happening, extracurriculars are happening, homeschool tasks are happening, etc., and then I don’t have to stress. When something new pops up, I either figure out what block to put it in, I may need to move things around, or I have to say no. I’ll go into this in more detail in a future episode but this is truly the KEY to my productivity and not getting overwhelmed.

Accept not everything will get done.

At the end of the day, we can only do so much. There are things I just don’t do or don’t do as well as I would like. There are things that take the back burner.

For me, I don’t deep clean as much as I would like, things like my windows, baseboards, and doors just don’t get cleaned as regularly as they would in a perfect world.

If I could, I would exercise an hour each day. I’m lucky if I do a 20 minute video and usually just try to stay active with my kids and take a long walk most days we are able to fit it in.

I don’t say yes as much as I would like to, especially to things during the day because I really protect our homeschool time and my dedicated work times. I know if those don’t happen, I can’t just make it up somewhere else. So, we have to say no sometimes to really amazing things.

None of us are super heroes but we make difficult choices for the betterment of our families and that is truly beautiful!

I hope this was helpful! Come back next week for even more tips and ideas for working homeschool moms!