Five Ways To Optimize Your Household Chores For Home Schooling

A number of people believe that the school is the child's second home. If you agree with them and if your household is into home schooling, you know you'll need to implement some changes in your old home to accommodate the educational itinerary in your daily routine.

The following measures are intended to optimize your household chores for home schooling. Check them out, and add, subtract or modify the measure as you deem fit.

• Designate a filing space. Since as a parent you'll be playing the role of both instructor and registrar in your home school, you need to allocate an area in your home or if space is an issue, one filing cabinet in your home office to keep school-related materials such as crayons, scissors, glue and colored paper, and school-related records such as your child's progress reports, journals or portfolio. You'll need these records in the future should you decide to send your student to junior college.

• Make junking junk a habit. Thanks to a whole load of paperwork and records that you'll be keeping in your home school, your house really has limited space to function as a junkyard. Get rid of the unsolicited home shopping magazines that land in your mailbox, any stale newspapers and notices of bills which you have settled already. Keep only the stuff that you need and tell the rest of the household to do the same.

• Plan your day. When you simplify things, you'll realize that what's being added to your old routine is actually a bulk of study hours with your child. You'll have to divide your twelve waking hours among more activities. Set realistic schedules and achievable goals on a day-to-day basis and don't forget to keep a record. After some practice, you can establish a new routine and things should follow smoothly.

• Prepare your menu and ingredients. When you cook, you actually spend more time in the preparation of ingredients than actually cooking the food itself. Cut time and modify your old routine by following a weekly menu. Chop, slice and marinate the ingredients ahead and store them in the freezer. Take them out when you're ready to start cooking. If you'd rather save cooking time by using the microwave oven, set aside a day when you can cook all the dishes you want to eat over the week. Store what you've cooked in the refrigerator and simply reheat the food of your choice when meal time comes.

• Segregate your laundry. One of the things that will take the backseat is the laundry. Instead of dumping everything in one basket, separate the white tops, colored tops, bottoms, underwear and towels in five separate baskets. If you organize your laundry this way, you'll know which load to prioritize and which load to wash on which day. Your clothesline won't be enough to accommodate a mountain of simultaneously washed laundry anyway.

Optimizing household chores to accommodate home schooling is a collective effort by you and your family. Don't forget to involve everyone.