Our Fresh Start Began with Popsicle Sticks

Homeschooling sometimes gets hard, y'all! 

This year I had the amazing idea of making our homeschool year last all year round. 

No long summer break for us.

I really think this will be a good idea but with no end in clear sight things are starting to get a little sticky around here.

Bad attitudes.

Crankiness.

Procrastination. 

And if you think those sound bad you should see the kids. 

Ha!

Truth be told it's been all of us. Just not into it.  Doing the bare minimum of work required.

It's been a good day if we get all of the worksheets and problems done.  Forget fun projects or artwork. 

As the sun was setting on the end of our yet-again horrific attempt at homeschooling last week I knew we had to do something.

Something had to get turned around or we were headed off the edge of a cliff in a car.

So I spent all weekend planning.

You know, like I'm supposed to every week .

The thing is, I spent MONTHS last spring preparing for this school year. I have a notebook with everything detailed that I need for each week.  Every book I need, art supply, everything. But some of it I had decided not to use and for some reason in my mind that meant that I wasn't going to use it at all. 

Which just is absurd.

So I went back to the notebook and ta-da!  most everything was already planned out for fun activities. 

With the help of that, pinterest, and just simply getting things ready for the week I was able to get started this week with our ducks already in a row.  Everything was planned out and ready to go.

So that was done but I was also faced with the problem of all of the bad attitudes.  I had managed to get myself out of my funk but how was I going to get the kids okay-ish with doing school again?

The answer, like always, practically jumped out of the Bible and smacked me in the face.  I love when my help comes from the Lord.  Which is pretty much all the time. 

Calvin had to memorize this verse the week before to complete his Awana book so it was a perfect jumping off point for this week.

To enforce or rather to encourage this, Sunday night Nick and I sat down in the living room with a bunch of popsicle sticks.

And we made chores.

Glorious chores.

It wasn't anything too hard.  Or anything that will take too long. But they are things that will definitely help out.

Clean the bathroom sink.

Put random lost socks in the laundry.

Things like that. (And as a total side note, can you figure out which of the popsicle sticks was written by me?  Nick totally has Doctor/Architect handwriting.)

I introduced the popsicle sticks to them in the morning while they were still in bed.  We had talked about the verse the night before so I reminded them of it and told them about the chore sticks.

I told them that all of their complaining and arguing just sucks the life right out of me.  And then I am too tired to do all of the chores so they will have to help.

It's only the third day but we've only had to draw out a popscicle stick twice.  Which means there's only been complaining two times

Which for me is like drawing a popsicle stick from the mom lottery.

Two times complaining in three days is a total win.

And every day we've been able to get our school work done.

Another win.

Our Fresh Start was three days ago and it's only just begun. 

Happy day friends! 

What do you need a fresh start on? Brainstorm, switch things up, and get going!