Family Routines vs Schedules
One thing that helps greatly in our homeschool, especially with multiple learners at home, is letting go of strict schedules and revolving our days around family routines instead.
What's the difference?
A schedule is a strict set of time frames when things should be done. Activities that operate according to a schedule often have specific start and end times. Schedules are important for life and learning to be on-time definitely plays role in family gatherings, outside classes and sporting events. But they're not usually necessary for managing your at-home learning and can actually make your homeschool feel rigid.
A routine is made of up of consistent family practices that tend to happen within broader, more flexible time frames. For example, in our house we tend to do individual math work in the mornings after we eat breakfast. But whether breakfast happens at 8am or 9am doesn't matter much. Neither does whether they work on their math for 30 minutes or for 1 hour. We just go with the morning flow each day.
Revolving your days around a family routine instead of a strict schedule helps to release the pressure of spending specific amounts of time on formal learning, allowing your children to complete tasks at their own pace, dive deeper when they feel inspired to, or transition to other interests as needed.
Something that really helps to establish family learning routines is YOU joining in on the learning as well. So if you decide to make your morning times for math, don't just tell the kids "go do math." But you sit down and do your own math as well. You could pay bills, work out the monthly grocery budget, or play a math game with your children. If your evenings are for Qur'an, put down your social media scrolling and work on memorizing your own surahs while the kids work on theirs.
To develop a family learning routine, think about the following:
What habits, rituals or family priorities do you have the need to be prioritized?
What regularly scheduled commitments do you need to work around?
How do you and your children like to spend your free time?
When do you and your children tend to have the most energy to learn/ work?
How can you blend learning into everyday family activities?
Embracing routines that allow you to learn together as a family help relieve the stress and pressure that can come with homeschooling multiple children, but more importantly it models that learning is an active, lifelong pursuit that happens at all ages and stages.