When I was a middle school teacher in the late 1990’s, we had a lot of time-consuming staff meetings after school. I don’t remember any of them. Except for one.

It was a meeting with a presentation about maintaining your “mental hygiene.”

Mental hygiene?! What on earth was that? That term cracked me up, and I still chuckle when I think about it.

Basically, it was a presentation for us teachers on how to maintain our sanity and be productive while our kids were super excited about the holiday season and could focus on little else.

The only tip I could remember was to listen to your favorite song in your car on your way to work to get your energy up. So, I did. I listened to all of my favorite Spice Girls songs while I drove myself to work in my Honda Civic.

Did it help? Yes, but only for a few minutes into my work day. I couldn’t sing Spice Girls to myself while I was trying to run a class.

However, over the years, I came up with a few teaching strategies of my own that both helped me with my “mental hygiene” AND kept the kids learning during the excitement of the holiday season.

You can use them in your homeschool too. Let me share them with you!

Holiday Survival tips for the Homeschooling Parent 

1. Teach short units. These few weeks between Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and other end of year celebrations is the time for short learning units in your homeschool.

Take a few minutes and plan ahead. You don’t want to stop in the middle of a long, involved unit and try to pick it up again after a long break for winter holidays. It’s preferable to start with a fresh new curricular unit after the new year.

If it isn’t possible to set up some short curricular units, simply find a reasonable stopping point part way through the one you’re on. Then plan enrichment activities to reinforce your kids’ learning.

2. Use enrichment activities dive further in depth with the content of a curricula unit. Their goal is to deepen, reinforce, and cement learning.

Enrichment activities are memorable, creative, and fun. They’re very handy to do when you have a time gap, for instance, before a family vacation or a holiday, when you don’t have enough time to dive into a new curricular unit and would rather wait until you return to your normal routine.

Enrichment activities are always a plus to add to the end of any curricular unit. They allow your kids to apply the knowledge they’ve learned creatively and exercise critical thinking skills. I always like to anchor learning with an enrichment activity or project whenever possible.

Skits, role plays, or hands on crafts projects like making a shadow box out of old shoeboxes are excellent enrichment activities. It’s easy to add rigor to them with a writing component. For example, you could instruct the kids to write a script for their role play or add a written explanation to the back of their shadow box.

3. Play more games when they’re particularly fidgety.

In a larger group, I recommend a form of Bingo or Jeopardy where kids have to successfully answer questions about their academics to score. I always kept both ready in my classroom for those days when kids were particularly distracted or we wanted to review material before a test.

It’s a fun way to use learning in a new context.

In a smaller home setting, store bought board games are terrific. For example, Scrabble or Bananagrams are always fun and reinforce vocabulary, and logic games like Mastermind or Blokus keep their minds working too.

And More Mental Hygiene Tips for You

While the holidays are fun, they’re also full of stress. There’s a lot of work and preparation involved. And I know you want to make everything perfect as possible for your family.

Don’t we all? But instead of perfection, consider this:

“Do the things you can do and don’t worry about the things you can’t do.” ~John Wooden

1. Delegate, or don’t do it.

This is very hard for me as a habitually detail oriented perfectionist. Believe it or not, my husband is now in charge of all the holiday gift shopping. Really!

2. Be honest about what you truly enjoy doing during the holidays and what’s just work. Discard the “just work” activities.

I have to be honest. For me, I get very tired of addressing Christmas cards. I think I’m going to skip the whole thing this year.

3. Take time to do something you enjoy every day. Everybody needs something to look forward to, especially you!

Do you like to watercolor? Take a walk by yourself? Exercise? Take some time to do it every day.

If you’re like me and every other person raising kids, you’re working all day long and into the evening. Don’t underestimate yourself and all the work you do.

4. Set your own quitting time for the day and stick to it.

After a long day teaching your kids and caring for your family, you deserve down time, even if it’s scrolling on social media or watching silly tv shows. We all need our down time.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family!

Thanks,

Lily