Ready to Learn? A Morning Check-In for the Home-Ed Day
This post is part of the Rhythm Not Routine series. Also in the series: A Four-Part Shape for the Home-Ed Day & Before You Close the Books: An End of the Day Checklist
How many times has a home-ed lesson started and been interrupted within the first fifteen minutes because someone forgot they needed to do something urgently, or the calculator was missing? The calculator is an easier problem to solve because it’s a prep-list task: do we have all the supplies we need for this lesson ready? That will either be your responsibility, or, if you’ve assigned home-ed job roles, one of your children’s. But the smaller interruptions, that are just kids being kids at home, are harder to manage out. You want your children to have the flexibility a classroom doesn’t offer. That’s not wrong (in fact, it’s often right) but it can mean flexibility becomes distraction. That’s why we introduced a simple four-step checklist to use before any lesson starts.
What the Ready to Learn Checklist contains, and why
The checklist is simple:
- Teeth brushed?
- Have you eaten and had a drink?
- Used the toilet?
- Are your clothes comfortable?
That’s it, and it sounds almost too simple to be useful. Here’s why it includes more than it seems.
Teeth brushed isn’t just a question about whether their teeth are brushed. Are your teeth brushed means: have you performed every hygiene task for the morning? Have you showered? Washed your face? Brushed your hair? With younger children, a visual bathroom checklist works well; for older learners, a smaller prompt feels less infantilising and has the same effect. Having it on a checklist also means you slow down and evaluate your child in the morning in the same way as you would if they were leaving to go to school, something it’s easy to skip when seeing them in pyjamas with unbrushed hair is familiar in the home environment. Pyjamas are a totally acceptable home-ed uniform if that works for your family. This isn’t about what they’re dressed in: actively encouraging home-ed students to hygiene prep for the day, as they would if leaving the house, helps them mentally switch between home and learning mode.
Have you had a drink and eaten? It’s the argument about water bottles on the desk that teachers in schools use: in-class drinking can be a distraction. Allowing your child to respond to their bodily needs without restriction is one of the benefits of home-ed, and yet it can still interrupt a lesson. If your home-ed rules allow cups of tea at the desk, the checklist note means: has the tea brewed? If you know your child sipping water continuously because the bottle is in sight is going to lead to a toilet-break interruption, asking them to drink before a lesson not during is not limiting their autonomy, it’s preventing disruptions to their learning. A pre-lesson snack is always a good idea.
Have you used the bathroom is self-explanatory and almost too obvious, and yet one of the things school teaches that home education can easily skip is the need for children to learn to pre-plan for toilet breaks. Obviously you’ll allow them to go if they need to, but as a general rule, toilet before sitting down to a task is a good habit to teach them, and is especially useful for ND learners whose bodily cues might need supporting before they become naturally recognised.
The most important item on our list is “are your clothes comfy?” School uniforms notoriously aren’t, but the clothes your children wear for home-ed will be. That doesn’t mean the child always recognises what’s comfortable before it starts to cause them distress. There are a few things worth checking: will they notice their clothes at all, or will what they’re wearing feel invisible on their body? If your child uses repetitive motion to stay regulated — the zip of a jacket, say — that’s fine to factor in; if the same zip is more likely to become a game that derails the lesson, no zips during learning time is a reasonable rule. Are their clothes suitable for the temperature and the environment? Not all home-ed lessons happen indoors, and teaching children to prepare for where they’ll be — checking the weather, thinking about suitable footwear — needs to be taught more explicitly in home education, because their parent is almost always nearby and it’s easy for clothing decisions to default to the adult. The goal, here as elsewhere, is that the child learns to read their own needs.
The checklist won’t make or break the day, but it can stop the small things from doing so. It’s absolutely fine to skip it or adapt it to one that better suits your child — for example, some children need to move before they can concentrate, or need the regulation that fresh air brings before attempting to sit still indoors. A 15-minute ‘walk to school’ or a cup of tea in the garden before lessons might be all you need to help activate their brains and make the mental switch from home to school. Alternatively, your child might just need 15 minutes to zone out in their bedroom, doing whatever activity lights them up before they’re asked to settle into the day’s tasks. You know your child and what they need: home-ed lets you give them that.
The simplest version of this checklist is downloadable here, and is adaptable for your child’s needs. Pinning it to the fridge or including it in your child’s daily checklist or weekly folder works well as a routine rather than you prompting them towards it. The goal is independence: the checklist is a small step towards teaching them self-care as well as keeping lessons on track.
