Start Your Homeschool Day with a Momference (or, a Dadference)


Help get your homeschool day going with a quick morning conference with each child......


This past week we’ve started back on our morning conferences (or as my 13 year old coined it “Momferences”) and subhanAllah, I have to say, it feels like we’ve gained some more control over our day, Alhamdulillah.

I’ve got 4 middle school/high school kids who work independently each day and without some type of conference, I get out of the loop or behind on correcting their work.  The struggle has been to find time for the conferences.  The older kids are in a public homeschooling program so there’s more accountability for them then when I homeschooled them independently. But, besides them, I have a 4th grade and 1st grader who I do homeschool independently and an active 2 year old. Finding time for daily conferences is difficult as you can imagine.

But, after the progress of this past week, for us, I've been reminded that they are a must for us.

So I made it a PRIORITY to fit them in.

I had fallen into the routine of letting the older kids lie down after praying Salaatul Fajr and they were really just getting up when they got up. There was little order.  So, this past week, the "new" rule became to stay up after Salaatul Fajr. With this change, among other benefits (such as Quraan), we now had time to conference (after they groom, clean, and do housework).  I've also added in weekend conferences to make sure that any work that wasn't completed during the week gets completed on the weekend (we are really bad about carrying work over to the next week).

A Momference doesn't have to be formal, it can be as easy as just seeing what's been done or not. But, I like to add in things like checking the kids' appearance, making sure they have said morning/waking up and getting dressed duaas, maybe quiz them on some math facts or something that they are building skills on. 

So, of course, if you know me,  I needed a checklist to help me remember all those things...

Homeschool Morning Meeting Organizer

And I like to have a To Do List for the kids where I can write down what is outstanding to work on and should be done by the next conference, 

Homeschool Morning Meeting To Do


Ideally I would like to meet with the kids in the morning and also late afternoon/early evening. I used to do that when we were overseas and we were homeschooling independently. Right now, I'm working on establishing the morning meeting and in shaa Allah, we'll move on to a second later conference time if I can work it in.

Related

The Home Scholar has a post on having a morning meeting.