The Homeschool Safety Briefing

Sure, it’s only July, and yes, I’m already jumping on the back-to-school bandwagon.

If you homeschool, you might not start your year until September or October.

Or maybe you do year-round homeschool, and one flows into the next.

My goal today isn’t to tell you how to set up your year. It’s to give you some tools BEFORE you need them. So don’t stress. Just read this at your leisure as a little boost before you get going on the next grade level, so you’re covered.

I’ve said “…in the unlikely event of a water landing” more times than I’ve said “see ya after school” to my daughter.

Yes, I homeschool, and yes, in my former life, I was once a high school English teacher and a flight attendant. Not at the same time. But it is interesting how much those two careers have in common.

Mostly there’s a lot of preparation.

Consider the safety briefing. It’s not there for the flight that goes well.

Nobody needs the exit row demonstration when a plane lands on time with good service and a mild tailwind. The briefing exists entirely for the four minutes that might go wrong, on a flight where everything else went right.

And if there are any teachers out there reading this, you know what I’m talking about, too. This is exactly why you have fire escape plans and lockdown drills, even when you’ve been teaching for 10 years and have yet to use any of them.

Every summer, homeschool parents get ready for the next school year.

If this is you, maybe you get organized by:

• Attending curriculum sales or homeschool expos

• Purchasing some version of the Pinterest supply list or the color-coded bins on sale at Amazon

• Applying a “new year, new mindset” via some influencer

I’ve tried all of these myself.

There’s nothing wrong with any of them; in fact, you may find some of it works for you. No family is going to fail at homeschool because they didn’t buy the right supply bin.

But consider how you may struggle because nobody briefed the entire crew before the doors closed. You jumped into homeschool on Day 1 with your curriculum, but you didn’t set up a contingency plan.

As a former flight attendant, let me give you the actual briefing you deserve to have with your seatback in the full upright and locked position.

The single most useful thing I ever learned in a jet bridge: you brief for the bad event while everyone is calm, because nobody can absorb instructions once the terrifying event happens.

Homeschool planning tends to only map the good days:

• Monday: math, spelling, read-alouds.

• Tuesday: science and civics

• Wednesday: co-op

This is fine for most days, but it’s a flight plan with no contingency for heavy weather, and trust me, heavy weather is coming.

It might be a sick kid who has to stay home from a co-op when you have a deadline, a meltdown at the grocery store when you’re in a hurry, or a week when the only thing that gets completed is basic survival.

If your plan has no room for that kind of day, the whole system doesn’t just hit turbulence and then smooth itself out; it crashes. And this leaves you feeling like you’re not just behind—but like you’re a homeschool failure.

You’re not a homeschool failure and shouldn’t feel like one either.

Locate your nearest exits before you need them.

What does a scaled-back day look like in your house?

Not in theory, but in reality? Practice it ahead of time.

What’s the bare minimum that still counts as “we did school today”?

Decide that now, in late July or early August, while you’re calm and caffeinated. Not at 7 AM on the actual bad day when you’re trying to figure things out with a crying toddler, an elementary kid, and a cold.

You know this line.

You’ve heard it enough times to say it in your sleep, and yet you still don’t apply it, and neither did I for most of my early years teaching or homeschooling.

It’s not actually about oxygen. It’s about sequencing.

You’re chemically, physically incapable of helping anyone else while you yourself aren’t breathing.

So, no, it’s not a generic self-care platitude, like treat yourself to a bubble bath or whatever. It’s an operational fact: the parent is the crew member responsible for everyone else’s ability to function, and a depleted crew member can’t manage the entire plane.

Your kids can tell.

They always know when their parent/teacher has stopped believing her own script.

So before you add one more thing to the kids’ schedule this year, add one thing to yours.

Will it be:

• A cup of coffee every morning that’s actually still hot when you drink it?

• Thirty minutes to yourself before anyone else is awake?

• Writing time without interruption?

And then apply this to how you open your day with your children.

Rather than just jumping into the to-dos, start with a greeting, a poem, a Bible verse, or the Pledge of Allegiance.

I was never into all those formalities growing up.

In fact, in my junior year of high school, I discovered a lot about what the United States had done in the world and outright refused to pledge each morning in school. I was a mini idealist who wanted justice to matter.

Today, I just want a home that has flow.

My 9-year-old got so excited about the 250th anniversary of America that she demanded my husband buy her two small American flags. So, now I’ve decided to start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance.

It’s a small decision that provides us with consistency, knowledge of our country, and a daily introduction.

My daughter can rebel against injustice when she’s a teenager. And I’ll find a way to work that into our curriculum.

For now, I’m eager to pull her into each school day with something she can easily memorize and something that feels like a little ritual.

Choose whatever your version of putting your own mask on first actually looks like. And then give your passengers their safety instructions; that’s the key. It’s not indulgent or a time-waster. It’s a sequence that sets the tone and gets everyone focused.

Before a flight moves anywhere, every jump seat reports in.

Doors get armed, cross-checked, and confirmed.

Nobody starts the pushback on a guess.

This is your kickoff conversation with your children—the one most families skip because it feels like a formality. But it’s actually the thing that prevents the most arguments in October or even April.

Sit down before the year starts and say the plan out loud to each other.

You want to have a conversation.

Here’s:

• roughly what this year will look like

• what I need from you

• what you can expect from me

• what we do on the bad days

Let them ask questions and even push back a little. A student who was briefed is a student who’s a crew member, not a passenger who got dragged onto a flight he wasn’t expecting to take.

You can even come up with your own homeschooling philosophy or vision/mission statement together. We created one to truly identify what our goals for homeschooling would be each year.

When things feel chaotic during the year, I pull it out to remind myself and my daughter not just what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it.

Here’s our Homeschool Mission Statement:

We strive to stay intellectually curious, to reflect on our own thinking, and to find spiritually enlightened responses to our quest for knowledge and understanding.

You can make this as basic or elaborate as you like. Make it secular, religious, patriotic, or philosophical.

Just put down a reason for why you are doing what you do as a homeschooling family and make sure the kids have some ownership over this statement, too.

Sure, everybody loves to clap after a great landing.

But nobody claps for a good pre-flight briefing because it seems boring.

Few people remember the flight attendant who got everything right.

But they sure do remember turbulence or a delay. They also remember that one time the guy in 14C had a meltdown over the overhead bin situation.

The good, boring, properly briefed flight is the one that just happens, and everyone disembarks and forgets your name when they’re exiting the airport.

But that’s exactly what you want.

Most of homeschooling is like that, too.

The good days don’t feel dramatic. They feel like a boring Thursday.

That’s not because nothing happened—it’s because you briefed for it. You built the exits in before you needed them, you put your own mask on first, you cross-checked with your crew before you ever left the gate.

And then you get well-adjusted children who score high on standardized tests, or who go out into the world and are kind and empathic to everyone.

So, when you get to the end of the year—maybe you haven’t finished your old one yet—you can mark it with celebration.

• Do a mini graduation ceremony

• Go somewhere fun like a restaurant you love or an indoor park

• Make a small diploma for your child

• Use Shutterfly or some other service to create a yearbook and highlight all the big accomplishments of the year.

Whatever you decide, make sure you do something to say this is the beginning and this is the ending of our school year.

Make it special and make it count.

Have a good year. You’re fully briefed and ready to fly.

This year, I’ve created a boarding pass for your homeschool.

My first product is up on Teachers Pay Teachers, and it’s an editable attendance tracker.

I’ve needed this tracker for the last 4 years, but never could find it, so I built it myself. It includes 18 different templates to keep you compliant no matter what state you live in.

You can choose between the tracker that focuses on required hours or days, or the one that keeps count using open time. All you have to do is type in daily hours or check off boxes. The Canva formula adds everything up for you so you know exactly how much time you’ve spent homeschooling.

There are even specific directions with screenshots on how to set up those days and hours so the tracker will keep a running total and show you how much time you have left in your school year.

The Attendance Tracker also includes a Year At A Glance Calendar you can print with July, August, and September start dates.

Best of all, the Attendance Tracker is free for the new school year.

GET YOUR FREE ATTENDANCE TRACKER NOW