When I was a little girl I went to our church’s program for young children every Sunday. For most of the hour we sang songs about Jesus and families, but one song was not obviously about Jesus and included memorable hand motions: The Wise Man and the Foolish Man. In this song the wise man builds his house upon a rock, and when the rains come down it stands firm. But the foolish man builds his house upon the sand, and when the rains come the house washes away.

It’s clear the song is about building your foundation on Jesus, but this song applies to more than just your spiritual life — as a mother, and now teacher, there is so much to learn from this song. 

If you want your homeschool as solid as a rock it needs to be built on a firm foundation. These foundational blocks are:

• A family vision, purpose, and goals.
• Clear expectations and responsibilities  of each family member. 
• Regular meetings to assess your family’s progress and ensure everyone is on the same page.

As the mother you are the manager of the household. Entropy is a real thing, and if you aren’t intentional your family and homeschool will slowly (or quickly) fall apart like rain washing away grains of sand. 

So this week is all about managing your household. You’ll be setting up a foundational routine for your family – weekly family council, daily housecleaning jobs, etc. If you already have a good routine in place, this is a good time to reevaluate it and make sure it will work during your new school routine. 

Family Mission Statement

Although my husband and I read scriptures and excellent literature with our kids, our days are constantly peppered with petty squabbles. Many nights I went to bed feeling frustrated and defeated. How can I help my children choose the right and apply the truths we are teaching them? It was around this time I stumbled on a wonderful advice in Christlike Parenting:

Taking a principle from human systems management, we can see how to make our home more positive while still maintaining a sense of agency;  Anytime you see your home in apparent chaos your training urges you to interfere to stabilize and shape things up. But if you can trust the workings of chaos, you will see that the dominant shape of your family can be maintained if you retain clarity about the purpose and direction of the members. If you succeed in maintaining focus, rather than hands on control, you also create the flexibility and responsiveness that every family craves. What parents are called upon to do in a chaotic world is to shape their families through concepts. Simple guiding principles, guiding visions, strong values, family beliefs – the few rules individuals can use to shape their own behavior. (paraphrased from Christlike Parenting by Glenn Latham, pg 159)

How can you establish focus, clarity, and guiding principles? By writing a family mission statement. If you have young kids I’d recommend the parents writing a short, but powerful statement together. If you have older kids, bring them into the process.

Think about these questions and use them to draft your own mission statement:

• What do you most value as a family? (travel, sports, music, reading, community, learning, outdoors). You can’t do everything, so chose only the most important.
• In 25 years, what do you want your family to be known as? The inclusive family? The adventurous family? 
• Which Christlike attributes, or character traits, are more important to you? (kind, courageous, intelligent, hard-working). Write down three. 
• Which historical or literary figures do you admire? 
• Which scripture or quote can you borrow phrases from?
• I use Charlotte Mason’s school motto as a template for my family’s: I am, I can, I ought, I will.

Our culture bombards us with so many good things (and not so good things) we can do and ways to spend our time. It is overwhelming. Before you move on to homeschool you need to sort through the static and decide what really matters to you and what your family stands for, otherwise you’ll become overwhelmed and burnt out. 

Write down your family mission statement and hang it up, review it every week at family council. 

Family Council

The next “stone” in your foundation is a weekly family meeting. My family calls it “Family Council.” We meet once a week on Sunday evening to go over the upcoming week and discuss the current status of our family. We talk about activities events, appointments, etc. and I ask three simple questions:

• What went well? (a good time to recognize good habits, effort, and kind deeds)
• What did not go well? (fighting, not doing chores, bad habits)
• What will we do differently? (which habits do we need to adopt? Which activities do we need to drop?)

We have to keep it less than fifteen minutes otherwise the kids get restless and uncooperative. Afterwards we have a treat and play a board game. 

However, a meeting once a week isn’t enough to make a difference, considering my kids forget what I told them five minutes later. So Every morning I try to have a quick meeting time during Family Gather where we review what we have for the day– appointments, subjects in school, activities and remind everyone what we are working on as a family (new habits or new routine). This is usually during breakfast. 

Individual Interviews

I also attempt (“attempt” being the key word) to have individual meetings with each child once a week. After family council my boys are usually done and ready to do anything except sit down and talk more, but I can usually squeeze in a 5-10 minute interview with each child. My husband and I go over the child’s individual goals and talk about what they may be struggling with and how we can help them. This is not a time for lectures, otherwise kids will LOATHE this alone time with you. This is a non-judgemental time to listen and collaborate with your child. If I notice a behavior or habit that needs to change I like to use Ross Greene’s method from his book Raising Human Beings: 

1. Mention what you’ve noticed: “I’ve noticed you have a hard time getting off screens when your timer goes off. What’s up?”
2. Listen to your child and what they think is going on. You can ask questions to help them verbalize, like “what are you feeling [or thinking] right before it happens?” But otherwise simply listen without interrupting, correcting, or lecturing.
3. Express your concerns. What are the long-term consequences of this behavior? How is it affecting other people? How is it affecting them? 
4. Brainstorm solutions together. I.e. “what if we set a 5 minute warning timer to let you know your time is almost up.” Listen to your child’s ideas first, sometimes they are the best ones, solutions you didn’t consider. Then try the solution and reevaluate next week. You may need to try something else, but keep working on it!

Cleaning + Chores

Next, Get your kids used to chores and housecleaning. They will absolutely have to help if you want to avoid burnout. If you have been doing the majority of dishes, laundry, cooking, and cleaning up to this point I recommend having a special family meeting this week. This is how I’d introduce it: 

1. Ask your children to list all the benefits of living in a family. 
2. Then ask them to list all the things that need to be done so they have those benefits (work so we have money; cleaning house, washing dishes, mowing lawn, cooking food, shopping, etc)
3. Talk about how each member of the family gets the benefits, but also needs to contribute to the family. I like to read the scripture (1 Corinthians 12:12-26) about how each part of the body has an important role. Just like each member of the family may be small, everyone is important and can contribute. Explain that from now on every member will be doing something to help. 

You can decide how to delegate chores based on your family’s needs. Here’s what i’ve been doing for 5+ years to manage household chores: 

Daily

Each day my kids have a “zone” of the main living area of the house to tidy up daily. When they are young they actually help me clean their zone so they learn how to do it and get in the habit. Each child is responsible for tidying up the messes in their zone, or asking the person responsible for the mess to clean it up. We rotate zones monthly so kids aren’t stuck with the same zone forever. 

Each child is also assigned a daily chore, like doing one load of laundry, one load of dishes, or cooking a meal. Again, if they are young they are my helper and I teach them how to do that chore.

As for me, I’m forever and always in charge of cleaning the kitchen. I try to have the counters clear every night and sweep or vacuum the main living areas every day. However, many days I go to bed and the kitchen is just barely above a total disaster. 

My husband bought a vacuuming and mopping robot that has freed up so much time for me because my kids have to simply ensure their zone’s floor is clear and I can turn the robot on and it does the sweeping and mopping for me. 

Weekly

Every Saturday we deep clean zones. Each boy is responsible for washing the windows, dusting, and mopping/vacuuming in his zone. Each boy is assigned a bathroom to clean and, since we only have two bathrooms, one boy vacuums the stairs. 

I’m not particularly fond of cleaning and would much rather be outside gardening, so we clean the upstairs and basement every other week instead of the whole house every week. So the basement gets a good clean twice a month and the upstairs gets a good clean twice a month. Saturday chores should take an hour, but realistically take more like two hours because of the complaining and dilly-dallying. 

Enter your email below and I’ll send you my family’s chore charts and other housework PDFs.

Rest Week

One method that has made the most positive impact in my life is Sabbath-style schedule. 

This simply means to have regular school for six weeks, then “rest” for one week. During this rest week you can: 

• Deep clean certain areas of the home 
• Cook large batches of freezer meals
• Go on a vacation or extended field trip
• Complete house or yard projects
• Take time to truly rest and bond

You can choose to do no school at all, or just the floor goals, which for my family is to read a chapter of a school book, copy down one sentence from that book, and do five math problems. 

I’ve found rest week can actually be a time for real-life learning projects, like starting seeds, making garden beds, installing flooring, and going on a vacation. My boys use their fraction knowledge to double or triple recipes. They use math skills to find the perimeter of a new garden bed and then figure out how much dirt we need to buy. When we go on vacation we learn about geography and historical sites of the place we go. 

Here’s what my rest week looks like:

	Deep Clean	Outdoors
February 14-21	Whole-House Declutter Kitchen	Start seeds indoors
April 1-7	Basement  and Bathrooms	yard “spring cleaning” and direct sow seeds
May 14-21	Garage	transplant seedlings
July 1-7	Schoolroom + Bookcases	weed and start fall crops
August 14-21	Bedrooms + Closets	outdoor project
October 1-7	Laundry Room + Organizing Systems	harvest fall crops and prepare yard for winter
December 14-21	Living Areas (dining room, music room, reading area)	build snowmen, sled, have fun!

My favorite house cleaning and organizing resource is Simply Clean. I don’t follow her method exactly, but I do love her cleaning checklists for the above rooms as well as cleaning tips and tricks. 

In the future I’ll dedicate a whole post to rest week — projects we do, how and what to freeze, and my favorite recipes. 

Homework Assignments

This week there is a lot to do! If this seems like too much for one week, just do the family mission statement and begin weekly family council. 

1. Write a family mission statement.
2. Begin weekly family council + individual interviews.
3. Delegate housework and figure out a method and routine that will work for your family. 
4. Schedule in your rest weeks to your preferred calendar app.