A Day in the Life of our Family - Our Daily Routine

Planning out our day is the most important thing we can do for our family. It allows us to spend more time doing the things we love to do, instead spending all that time on figuring out how we are going to get it all done in a day. Our Family Contribution Chart is a big part of our daily routine as well as our school lessons. How did we do it this year?

I used a combination of Managers of Their Homes and 5 Steps to a Successful Day. A few years ago I picked up the Managers of Their Homes and went through the process of laying out the day for each person in our home. It was wonderful to see all the things each of us had to do each day and how we all fit together like a puzzle. When the kids were resting, I would have free time. When my schedule said "work with Stella", her schedule said "work with mom".

This year at convention I had the privilege of listening to a few sessions with Sue Pruett, The Charlotte Mason Girl. She compiled an E-book on the 5 Steps to a Successful Day. I was surprised that this E-book turned out to be useful for any family, homeschool or not, Charlotte Mason style or not. I used it to fine tune the Managers or Their Homes schedule. It was such a blessing to our family because there is a system of prioritizing our tasks through the day and cutting out the task(s) that will not fit in our day.

I change the name to routine, because we seem to be more accepting to flexibility in a routine than a scheduled day. Schedule means a list of items, a program, a timetable, a production plan, to plan for a certain time. In my eyes, schedule means this is what I have to do at this time. (Example: In a schedule Breakfast is at 9am and the morning routine needs to be finished before we eat breakfast. That can turn out really bad on a day when we all are not feeling well or we get up late.) Routine means a prescribed and detailed method of a procedure, habitual; regular.  I look at a routine as a checklist, with a few scheduled things in it, like meals or appointments. We take a break from the routine for the scheduled task and then go back to the routine after the task is complete. (Example: In a routine, morning routine happens before breakfast, but if we get up late, we stop our morning routine and eat at 9, then continue working on our morning routine.) Now, if we have issues with a child continuously getting up late too often or every day I do say, to that child only, that the morning routine must be done before breakfast to get them motivated. Then I allow for flexibility again once they show that they have regained the habit of getting out of bed on time.

Below is our Daily Routine: This Routine is not meant for everyone to adopt exactly, but feel free to use it to create your own routine. The priorities in our family are probably not the same as yours. Check out the above references on how I came up with this routine for our family. It will help you with your day too.

Routine Fall 2012

This is how we are going to work our days this year. It does change on occasion like all routines do. We will be inserting Field Hockey and our Library Day into the week when we know the days and time for them. I am so ready to get started on our new year. Just waiting for the expersts over at Well Planned Day to finish building the digital planner and then off we go. Hope you gleaned some good information from this post. Let me know in the comment section below.