BJU Press Blog

organization

Meal Planning to Save Your Day—and Your Budget

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meal planning menu
It’s that time of day again. The kids are starting to whine and grumble. They’re getting hungry, and it’s only a matter of time before chaos ensues. You throw open the fridge or pantry, desperately looking for something that you can cook quickly—something that even your picky eaters will like—but it seems you never have the right ingredients on hand.

What if you could spare yourself the stress of last-minute meals and make your grocery shopping process much easier? Meal planning is a way to have less stress (and more money since you’re not spending extra dollars on takeout or impulse buys at the grocery store). Here are some meal-planning tips from real moms to get you started.

• Create a monthly meal schedule

Take the advice of homeschool mom Erica and decide in advance what you and your family are going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for thirty days. Monday could be cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and fruit for lunch, and spaghetti with garlic bread for dinner. Tuesday could be pancakes for breakfast, leftover spaghetti for lunch, chicken broccoli casserole for dinner, and so on. If a month feels like too much, start by planning out the meals for just one week. Having a plan trims your grocery list to the essentials and takes the mealtime decision-making off your mind.

• Have fun with the plan

One way to make your meal plan more interesting is to create themed days or weeks. One week could feature Mexican foods; another might highlight Italian or Asian cuisine. You could also give each day of the week a theme, like Meatless Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, and so on. Ask your kids to help you brainstorm the themes for each week, or let them plan all the meals for one day every month.

• Make multiple meals at once

Set aside an afternoon or an evening to cook several meals at one time. You can make casseroles and freeze them, or double your recipe for soup or chili so you’ll have leftovers for a few nights. Make a lot of pasta and divide it into smaller containers for lunches. If you’re just cooking up some chicken or ground beef, brown an extra pound or two and freeze it; that’s time saved on another day. This tip is courtesy of Kim, busy homeschool mom and blogger at NotConsumed.com.

• Give your food budget a makeover

Every homeschool family could use a little spare change in their food budget, and meal planning can help with that. If you’re looking to do ultra-cheap meal planning, check out $5DollarDinners.com, a resource packed with inexpensive recipes that are crowd-pleasers for the whole family. Erin Chase runs the website and shares her grocery budget makeover ideas with interested moms and dads. You can even sign up for her free weekly newsletter.

• Allow yourself some takeout time  

You can still eat takeout occasionally or visit your favorite restaurant. Just be sure that you include your weekly pizza night or monthly visit to the local seafood restaurant in your meal plan. After all, you’re saving money with a meal plan; there’s nothing wrong with eating out once in a while.

Remember, modern dads and moms have plenty of kitchen help, thanks to microwaves, freezers, dishwashers, slow cookers, electric grills, vegetable steamers, and rice cookers. Use those tools to save time as you plan ahead and prepare tasty, affordable meals for your family.

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Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and the mom of two bright-eyed little ones. She credits her success in writing and her love of books to her own mom, who homeschooled three kids from pre-K through high school.

 

Tour These Homeschool Spaces

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Tour These Homeschool Spaces

Whether your kids work at the kitchen table or in a dedicated homeschool space, you’re probably always looking for creative ways to stay organized. Here are some of our favorite homeschool room designs, ideas, and hacks from Christian homeschool mom bloggers.

Mandy, who wrote for the blog Biblical Homemaking, takes organization and design to a new level with her creative homeschool room. Her blog no longer exists, but you can see how her homeschool room accommodates four kids working at the same time in the picture below!

Biblical Homemaking homeschool room

Erica from Confessions of a Homeschooler enjoys the “school at home” style for her boy and girls. A dedicated homeschool space in her basement is as well equipped as any modern classroom. Check out the tour!

Confessions of a Homeschooler homeschool room

Lara from Everyday Graces takes a warm and cozy approach to her homeschool room. (We love the reading nook!) Check out her comfortable and welcoming room for her boys here!

Everyday Graces homeschool room

I hope you enjoyed these ideas. Share your homeschool space ideas in the comments below!

Image Source: camera; wood

How Do You Plan Your Homeschool Year?

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Planning Your Homeschool

One of my earliest homeschool memories is that Mom had a plan. She might not have printed it out for me to read, but it was clear that our day followed an organized schedule. Some homeschool days we stayed at home; other days I took my textbooks with me while we ran errands. Some were longer; others shorter, like the Fridays I attended art class with other homeschool kids.

Having a plan meant Mom could leave the room to take a long distance call and expect me to do what was next on the schedule. It also was a way to make sure that I reached the academic goals that she and my dad had set for me. But the plan was also flexible enough to allow for events that interrupted our day, like days at the park or doctor appointments.

As you prepare for the new homeschool year, what thought have you put into planning a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule? Here are some tips and helpful suggestions to plan your homeschool.

Now please don’t fall into the trap of “over-planning.” Some people might argue there’s no such thing, but I have learned that there’s a balance that must be learned, and it looks different for every family. You might be a minute-by-minute-schedule person, but that kind of planning overwhelms me. The real key is to keep Isaiah 46:8–10 in mind. God is in control of all (including the “interruptions” to our plans) and always works out His good pleasure. There’s comfort in that truth.

What does your homeschool schedule look like?

Staying on Course with Homeschool Organization

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tall ship sailing
© iStockphoto.com/FransDekkers

As a homeschooled kid, I thought very little about the amount of time and effort it took for my mom to keep everything organized. The concept only entered my mind when a new “school cabinet” showed up in our basement or living room and quickly filled up with books and DVDs, or when I saw my mom sitting at the kitchen table, notebooks and schedules spread out before her, like a ship’s captain consulting star charts and plotting the right course. With three kids, it took organization and discipline to make it all happen. Add in another child, or two or three, and homeschooling really gets complicated. Here are a few tips for keeping your little sailors and their school gear shipshape.

Color-Coding

Organization begins with stowing the books and supplies. My mom used a large cabinet with double doors and plenty of shelves, but other moms use cubbies, bookcases, drawers, and wall shelving─anything that can conveniently store a lot of books and educational items. To make it easier on you and on the kids, assign each child his or her own shelves, drawers, bins, or cubbies. Try color-coding these storage spaces using labels and the children’s names. The colors allow little ones to identify their supplies, even if they cannot read yet.

Of course, you also have those miscellaneous supplies that everyone needs─markers, pens, pencils, glue, scissors, sticky notes, folders, and paper. A separate cabinet or desk, placed in an accessible spot in your homeschool area, can house these “common use” items.

Using a Planner

Many textbooks and teacher’s manuals come with planning aids, and detailed homeschool planners are available online or in notebook format, depending on the style that is most comfortable for you. Before the beginning of the school year, set aside ample time to go through the kids’ upcoming subjects and create a plan for each child and every school day, right through the first month. It’s time-consuming but much less stressful in the long run. Of course, you can adjust your planner as you go along until you have a schedule that works well for everyone.

Teaching in Shifts

Homeschooling a mix of grade levels offers the potential for teaching independence and self-motivation. Using homeschool DVDs or online videos helps immensely here since you can start the older children with their lessons and check in on them periodically to keep them on track and to answer questions. Meanwhile, you can focus on the little ones who don’t yet have the attention span or the learning skills to take on a lesson by themselves. For instance, phonics and reading with a couple of the younger children happens while middle grade and high school kids are busy watching their video lessons.

If you don’t use video lessons, simply set up the older children in a quiet corner of the house with their reading assignments and then talk through the concepts with them later while the little ones are busy with worksheets. Work together on fun activities such as art, music, math manipulatives, and science experiments.

Knowing When to Flex

Many moms find that allowing their kids a little flexibility within the overall schedule works wonders. For example, Sophia may want to do math first and then science, rather than vice versa. If it doesn’t negatively affect anyone else’s schooling, Mom allows her that freedom to switch the two subjects. That way, Sophia is more engaged and interested in her work, and she gains a sense of responsibility for making that decision. It doesn’t change her assignment─ it just improves her mindset.

Motivating the Sailors─and the Captain

Whining and wailing about the workload happens in every homeschool, but it can really sap a mom’s patience. With a combination of consequences and rewards,  you can keep wayward sailors in line and stay the course for a successful homeschool day. If Jackson doesn’t finish his math assignment within the allotted time, it goes on the “evening work” pile and the schedule moves on to the next assignment. Jackson─and his siblings─quickly realize that the more they accomplish during school hours, the less they have to do later.

At the end of the day, not every pencil may find its way back to the pencil holder, and a couple of history pages may still be unread. What matters is the moments when their eyes light up with understanding, when they randomly give you a squeeze around the neck and a kiss on the cheek, or when they bend over a younger sibling and say, “Let me teach you what I learned.”

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Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and the mom of two bright-eyed little ones. She credits her success in writing and her love of books to her own mom, who homeschooled three kids from pre-K through high school.

The View from the Deep End: A Former Teacher’s Homeschool Story

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When you first wade into the homeschooling waters, it’s a good idea to scoop up all the knowledge and ideas you can from moms who have been doing this a long time. I’m still in the shallows of homeschooling, but my friend Brenda is an expert at swimming the deeper waters. As a former public school teacher, Brenda’s blend of knowledge and talents made her the ideal teacher for her own two boys.

After graduating with a degree in education, Brenda became a second-grade teacher at a public school. She stayed in that role for six years—until she decided to make the switch to stay-at-home mom and homeschool teacher.

“My homeschooling day was very much like a public school day,” she recalled when I asked her about her first foray into homeschooling. “I made a classroom space in my home. I purchased a work table and two desks.” She also set up a bookshelf to hold teacher’s manuals, learning aids, and manipulative materials.

As a former classroom teacher, she immediately saw the advantages that homeschooling provides. She could go slowly with difficult topics or move quickly if her child was grasping the concepts easily. “Teaching your own children allows you to move through the curriculum at your child’s pace rather than waiting for twenty-eight other children to finish each subject!” Brenda told me.

homeschool mom and daughter sitting outside doing BJU Press K5 Math

One concern that I have as a homeschool mom is what to do when children start testing their boundaries during school hours. How can I maintain both the role of mom and the role of teacher? “Most children would think twice about acting out in front of another authority figure, such as a teacher,” Brenda admitted. “But acting out with Mom would occur whether a child were homeschooled or not.” She told me that a homeschooling mom needs to commit to being patient and consistent, especially in her role as teacher.

One big question on my mind is curriculum choice, so I asked Brenda about her selection. “I have stayed with BJU Press because I have confidence in their scope and sequence,” she said. “The lessons are so well put together, and I know my children will be taught all the important concepts.”

Brenda’s older son has just entered a private Christian school. I asked Brenda why she made the decision not to homeschool past the elementary grades. “I like the fact that the Christian school provides so much opportunity with music, theater, and sports teams as well as classroom group activities,” Brenda answered. “My son had been in the BJU Press curriculum since kindergarten, and he was very prepared to enter the Christian school setting.”

Not everyone who dives into homeschooling is a former teacher. However, each parent brings a unique set of gifts and skills to the home classroom. In Brenda’s words, “The most beneficial thing is getting to spend quality time with my children, knowing exactly what they’re learning, and being able to give them a biblical worldview.”