Back to School Stress and a Free Seatwork Printable for Your Home School

That’s Daniel, 2 years ago. This photo just never gets old to me.

I’m flipping out today.

I’m a little bit stress paralyzed.

I thought I would start school on August 17th, but that’s not going to work. My grade book is set up for school to start on the 10th. The entire school calendar and all of my plans are set up for the 10th as the start date.

How did I get my plan so confused? I’ve got most of the learning materials ready, but I don’t have the cleaning and organizing done, which is just as important!!!

I want everything to look all bright and sunny and exciting for the boys’ first day.

Instead, my closet is a wreck. My office looks like a school supply store crashed into a library.

My mom isn’t arriving until Friday because I was thinking school started on the 17th.

Did I mention that I have a headache?

I have JD in my lap, Caleb and Daniel are across the street bugging the neighbors, and it’s 10:45 am already.

On a high note, I have accomplished 3 things today:

1. I read my Bible and prayed.

2. I actually got cleaned up and dressed. Thankfully, Alan was here for me to do that. Now he’s at the library.

Alan made fun of me for putting ‘shower’ on my to do list and checking it off. I stand by my list. Showering is an accomplishment for moms.

3. I created and printed Joshua’s seat work assignment sheet for the year. This is a home school life saver. Joshua is in 4th grade. He’s able to do a great deal of self-directed work. With this list, if I’m too busy to help him, he can simply look at his list and go to the next thing.

This list is sort of specific to Joshua, but if it helps anyone, I’m including it. Maybe it can at least help other home school moms get ideas.

What I do is print it, take it to Staples, and ask them to make me 100 copies.

100 should get us to April, since we don’t do seat work on tutoring days or field trip days.

I already did this for Caleb’s seat work template, so I know that to get these 2 sheets printed as 1 sheet front and back, times 100, comes out to $25, including tax. Huge time and sanity saver!

Click here for the printable: Essentials Seatwork

Once it’s printed, I just fill in the blanks of the specifics for what I want them to do, but at least I don’t have to write “Copy Spelling”, “Read”, “Copy charts”, “Write multiplication tables”, and “Handwriting”, etc., etc. etc. 100 times!

Okay, I’m watching my poor neighbor friend wrangle our two 4-year-olds. They are playing soccer in her front yard. I’d better go help.

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I’m happy to report that I got all 100 copies printed at Staples, as well as Spelling List copies. Now to get this place lookin’ good!