At this point of unexpectedly homeschooling your kids this year, you are probably in weeks 1-3 and wondering, “How in the world are we going to do this all year?”  Valid question.

Pop quiz: What’s the most important thing to a teacher when preparing for the first few weeks of a new school year?

A. Inviting and welcome classroom layout and design

B. Excellent lesson plans

C. Predictability, consistency, and routine

If you guessed C, you’re right! Inviting classroom environments are important, but they can’t all be perfect. Excellent lesson planning is also critical to get through each day. You might be surprised, but routine and predictability are actually at the foundation of a good school year. This doesn’t apply just to behavior, but to classroom functionality as well. 

Here’s why: 

This kind of predictability may seem dull, but kids actually crave it and thrive on it. Abundant research backs the idea that children cope with the challenges of school and life when routines and predictability are in place. Veteran teachers have the experience to prove it!

A well-meaning 3rd-grade teacher in the first week of school might realize that his students need a bathroom break. He stops his lesson after several students have already interrupted to ask, tells them to line up in any order, and start walking. If he keeps this up for the rest of the year, the bathroom break and his bathroom procedures will be the thorn in his side, taking away focus from all students and interrupting important instructional time. 

Imagine if the same teacher took a different approach: The teacher anticipates the students’ needs. He knows that at some point, they will need to use the bathroom. He has created a system where students can function independently. He has an enlarged print-out of the expectations for going to the bathroom as a class.

He collaborates with the students to come up with a fun song to help memorize the expectations. They’re quizzed on it at the end of the week. The students know where to find this information if they forget. They practice the entire routine over and over, and they go back and start over every time that they mess it up.

By the third week of school, these kids know exactly what to do, they have confidence in their own utility, and they get it right every single time. What did this teacher do right? He used consistency to build a predictable routine that the kids would be able to rely on every single time.

There are times and places for surprises, breaks from the ordinary and surprise, but your kids will actually enjoy their school day more, they will get more done, and they will perform better as students if you can establish little systems of predictability.

The same rule applies at home as it does at school. There is certainly a new set of challenges and distractions, but we all know how resilient kids are. Creating an environment of consistency is one of the biggest gifts you can give to your kids right now while they are learning at home.