Organizer Questions from a Seasoned CMOrganizer User- Feedback Wanted

Christie – I can share what I do in some of these situations.

We school 4 days a week, typically, MTWF. Thursdays are for our CM co-op. In my head, I plan for the following for family work, but what about when life happens. I’d rather contine with the order of my books and disregard the supposed day for each, but we won’t work out of both books on the same day. Is it simplest to have all show up daily and then just close the ones we won’t use by remembering what we did the day before?

I do that, to some extent.  I go through and minimize the things we won’t be doing that day.  I don’t print off the schedules, but I have been told that the minimized resources won’t print, so it does not add to the legnth of your printed list.

Another thing to do is to push the button at the bottom of the page that says “show work not scheduled for today” or something like that.  Then you can just check of the things you need and your daily page doesn’t get too cluttered (I am feeling right now that my own daily page is too cluttered!  I need to do some pruning on rarely used resources – move them to Saturday LOL.)

Simple Ways to Handle Chores and not have LOADS OF PRINT-OUTS each day?

I made my own version of the chore-paks everyone is always raving about – and it has been a fabulous change for our family! The cards indicate their daily chores, so they are not listed individually in the organizer.  I do have a listing for each child called “daily chores” which I check off when they are finished.

How do you handle resources like Material World or What the World Eats? These are books we have out on the coffee table that get looked at often, but we never actually “schedule”. Is there an easy way of simply documenting their use via the CMO without tying them to a certain day or chapter?

For this kind of resource I put in a bunch of divisions but don’t label them – for Material World, for instance, you could count how many countries are featured and put in that many divisions if you wanted, call the resource type “Country.”  The each time you spent time looking at the book, check off a division as finished.  You can add the country name in the notes if you want.  That way you have a record, but don’t have to worry about the order.

You could also just enter these as resources, make a note explaining how they are used, and check them as finished.  That way they will print out in your records for this school year, if you are documenting for a portfolio or something.

How do you enter extra books read by your kids? I have a shelf of extra books related to our Module 5 study that are simply there for free reading. I don’t schedule them, but it would be nice to record when the kids read them. Perhaps I should put them all on for Saturdays and when they tell me they finish one, I’ll click finished. That should work, right?

Yes, that would work.  I often just quickly add a book by isbn and check it finished or add it, open the calendar by the resource, estimate how many days the book was read, mark those worked on then mark it finished.

Hope that helps at all!

As for the free reading, I use the leisure reading category, schedule it everyday, and make sure that I add the resources myself using the ISBN number function so there are no divisions (books from the bookfinder usually have chapter divisions). My children read their leisure reading the speed of light which would make a lot of clicking off of chapters in one day. I prefer the one “worked on/finished” click for leisure reading. I reserve the literature category for “school” books.

As for those books that are partially read, I either enter it as the leisure reading with no divisions and just mark worked on and remove from the list when we’ve had enough (for a book that is read from the middle, upside down, backwards, randomly) or I make blank divisions and note the exact pages that were read in the note box. It just depends…I guess. 

You know, everytime I read posts on ideas on the organizer I make changes to how we use it…    I was using a 12 division – Month for things like violin practice….  but soon our 100 day of practice challenge is happening…. I’m thinking that I’ll change to a daily division (366 divisions… next year is a leap year!)  I think it’ll make it easier to keep track…. and I can note down anything special….   or maybe I’ll just make 100 divisions, and keep restarting it….