The Johnson Crew!

Hi friends who's getting pumped for the school year to begin who's dreading it who's not really sure and just wishing the summer would continue on forever uh yeah kind of oscillate between all three of those depending on the day so but today is about getting pumped for the 2022 to 2023 school year this is the year that we are gonna have our ducks in a row before school starts yeah we're gonna be prepared stress free instead of you know running around like a chicken with our head cut off

So who's in little caveat here though if you have already started school but already feel like you might need a little reset don't feel bad taking a little step back a day off doing these things I'm about to chat with you about and restart it's okay it's just totally okay before we dive in I do want to say a huge thank you to all of my subscribers y'all are amazing and we just hit 3 000. I couldn't be more thankful for y'all and I'm so excited thank you thank you if you are new here

And you haven't subscribed yet I would love to have you join us here in this community it's pretty awesome and in honor of all of you I want to do a giveaway this is my first giveaway on this channel and I'm really excited about it and I hope you will be too so I will be giving away a devotional book from the daily grace company called daughters of grace I am three quarters of the way through my own copy and love it love it I'm also going to be giving away a planner I got this planner like a month ago

And honestly as much of a planner as I am I have not owned a planner in a long time like a paper planner I've been typing everything into my phone or you know writing on a piece of paper but a planner has been awesome and I think you're gonna love it it's not just for homeschool things really it's meant to contain your to-do list for all the things you need to get done I like to start my day like brain dumping into the blank pages that they have

And then pull those things over and put them on today's day and whatever I think I can get done that day that just helps me feel a lot less chaotic I'm not having to juggle all that stuff in my brain I have put it on paper so I know I'm not going to forget it and it will get done because it was written down right so hopefully those two things will be a blessing to you helpful to you if you want to enter the giveaway all you have to do is type your comment below starting with your favorite food emoji

So that I know you want to enter the giveaway and then just tell me how many kids you're homeschooling this year that's it I'll be selecting the winner on august 23rd and announcing the winner in my video next week august 24th so stay tuned for that so thank you guys so much if you do find this video helpful please give it a thumbs up and share it with your other homeschool mom friends I really feel like this is a key thing to do in your home school what we're going to chat about today

So hopefully this will be helpful to you as well if you missed last week's video on how to prepare for the school year as a homeschool mom and how to plan out your homeschool routine that's really part one and I would recommend going and watching that one first if you haven't prepared those things yet you can pause this watch that first but that's really part one to what we're going to talk about today so assuming you've already looked at all your curriculum and mapped out a routine for your school day

Now you're ready to get your kids on board so let me give you my overall thoughts and then I'll break it down into steps one huge way to make this school year better than last school year is to sit down and think about how last school year went think about what pain points there were what caused frustration in your kids or between you and your kids do you have a behavioral system set up for the school year like a rewards and consequences type of system I have a video on what we do in our school I'll leave a link to that video below we call it the star system very fancy name

But if you do have a behavior system in place you know is it still working for you do you need to revamp it if you don't have one do you want to implement one this year this is definitely the time to figure those things out maybe your kids need more motivators to get them through each subject like timers or gum or more breaks did the routine you had last year work well for y'all or do you need to figure out how to finagle that better

So that it flows better for you maybe finding where the bottlenecks were in your routine last year so you can make it better this year like I talked about in last week's video I've set up our routine so that I'm not over booking myself what I mean by that is I'll have two kids watching a video lesson or doing their independent work while I'm busy teaching another kid so that kind of thing we also want to take the time to debrief with our kids about how they feel last school year went

And how we can make it better this year you know they may feel a lack of investment in their schooling because they didn't get to have a say in how it's going to go so giving them a chance to have some input will hopefully give them some buy-in as well and I'm not talking about like a five-year-old but like eight years old and older I give them a chance to have their say because getting buy-in from them totally changes their mindset about school and I try to put myself in their shoes like what would I want to know about the upcoming school year things are always easier when we know what to expect

And what's expected of us so we've got to share those things with our kids or they're going to get confused and get frustrated or they're going to frustrate us because they don't know what to do things will go much smoother if we're all on the same page okay now that all the thinking through of all the things has been done it's time to have a briefing meeting with our kids and a pep talk you know schools have back to school night so homeschoolers need to have a back to school morning huh you like it it's catchy right

So I took one day last week and I sat down in our school room with each of our kids individually while the rest were preoccupied in front of the tv now this individual piece I think is really key in this conversation this briefing meeting because they love individual attention and they're going to be so much more responsive and attentive if it's just them no other sibling to distract them and you can have a more valuable conversation when it's just the two of you so I sat down with them at their desk

And pulled out their curriculum and we went through each book together to show them what their curriculum looks like and talked about how long each lesson should take how many worksheets they're expected to do per day that kind of thing and then I pulled out my notebook where I had jotted down their subjects and how many lessons they had to get done per week for each subject to give them an idea of what their week would look like so all right you've got to get four language arts lessons done a week

But only two science lessons done that kind of thing and then I showed them the rough draft schedule that I had made like the order of subjects that I want each kid to do so that I'm not overbooking myself and showed them right this is kind of how we need to work this so that I can teach this kid at this time while y'all are doing these things and I can teach you at this time while they're doing these things and so I think it's really good to show them the bigger family picture hey this is what everybody has on their plate

And then showing them how my time is getting divided up and I think that that'll hopefully give them a better understanding of the bigger picture and more understanding of my time constraints and then I showed them the rough draft schedule that I made for their school week and asked what they thought about it and gave them a chance to make changes to it of course I was explaining why I laid it out this way and why I thought it made the most sense kind of hoping that they wouldn't want to make changes to it

But if they really wanted to make changes to it we could have and I explained that this doesn't have to be the concrete schedule for the whole year but if they do end up wanting to change the schedule they cannot ask to change it within the same day that they think of it like I'm not going to just call an audible right then and there because it does affect everyone else's schedule so I explained if you want to change this come and talk to me

And we'll make those changes within the next couple of days and they seem to be on board with that and I'm sure that I'll have to remind them of that conversation but at least I can point back to hey remember when we talked about this that is how nice I sound every day then I showed my third and fifth graders the kitchen timer that I got each of them so that they can time their independent work and time their own breaks so they were excited about that

And then I showed them that I put a little container on the bookshelf in the school room that's full of gum and mints that's all sugar-free so they can have one piece per subject and they don't even have to ask me for it they can just grab it and they were really excited about that I kind of feel like gum and mints can act like a like a fidget spinner does you know for helping kids focus so I'm all for it and I reiterated how our behavior system works

And showed them how I'm gonna do a better job keeping track of their stars every week if you can see back here on my cork board I laminated this sheet of paper so I can put their stars here every day and then erase them if they lose them that day and then we'll keep track of them every day and then we'll move those weeks totals over here this is not laminated and we'll keep track of the stars that they earn every week and we can deduct what they use every friday at our star store whatever stars they use to buy things there we will deduct those points on this list

And that way they've got this running total that they can look at and if they're trying to earn up for a bigger ticket item they can be excited about that and hopefully give them more motivation to be good listeners and have good attitudes and do their work in a timely manner so that we can have a good easy smooth school day that's the hope and by the way the consequence that is part of the system is that if they lose all their stars for the day they lose their ipad time for the day

So that's a pretty big sting for them so that seems to work pretty well and lastly I gave them a pep talk about how excited I am about this upcoming school year how much they're going to learn how much smarter they're going to be next year and how much better this year is going to be than last year because of these different changes we're making and because of our curriculum and all those things and just trying to get them pumped up get them excited then I went into how important their individual role is in making the school year better than last year

And in making the school day run smoothly and calmly and great I explained that their attitude not only affects how quickly and how well they can get their school done but it also affects me and then that affects the whole house and so I tried to really impress upon them that they have such a huge role to play and how our school day goes that they have a lot of responsibility in that not in like a threatening way but an empowering way you know if they know that they have the power to make the day better or worse then they're more motivated to have a better attitude

So just trying to empower them give them that personal responsibility explaining their very important role in how the school day goes I feel like is really really key and it's not a conversation that we will just have one time like we're going to have it again the morning that school starts and probably the next morning and you know like this is something we'll we will talk about often throughout the school year because they're going to always need reminders of this but I feel like it makes a big difference when they're reminded of their role in the school room

Okay one last thing that I'll mention is that I printed out a calendar up here on the cork board there it is printed out just the next two months to put up there and that way I can go ahead and write what's coming up that they have to look forward to so vacation field trips days off you know whatever it is birthdays putting that stuff up on the school wall so they can look forward to it in the next couple of weeks can really boost morale you know not feeling like school is just going to go on every day every week

And it's so long showing them no you've got this break coming up and this break and this fun thing I feel like adds a lot of hope and enthusiasm into having a good school day because it doesn't feel like it's just gonna go on forever so and I like having a calendar on the wall for me also I really hope that this was helpful to you and getting ready for the next school year getting your kids on board and getting them excited hopefully that will get you excited as

Well and you will have an amazing start to your school year thank you so much for being with me today don't forget to enter the giveaway in the comments below I'm super excited about that and excited for one of you to be the winner and thank you all again so much for being subscribers here I just love this community here on youtube everybody is so encouraging having this space for homeschool moms to chat and encourage each other is really awesome I hope you guys have an awesome day

And an awesome start to your school year and I'll catch you in the next video thanks bye