Organizer–{Sell me on it}….{How has it helped you}?

I love it. I have a first grader this year and will have a second and kinder next year. I would describe my self as an paper person, not an Internet person, but I also have perfectionist tendencies so paper was just driving me crazy. I always wants to erase and fix my planner if we didn’t get to something, but I also wanted to plan more than 2 weeks at a time.

With the organizer I can sit down and seriously plan for a couple hours before the school year. I figure out what subjects on what days and put everything into the organizer, in the order we plan to read the books. Then I’m done. For the year. I don’t have to sit and plan every Sunday for an hour. I do reasses everything around midway through our year, which happens to be thanksgiving/Christmas, and then I take out or add different things.

Ifnyou hve any questions for me go ahead and shoot. 🙂

I totally understand your predicament.  I have five students that I am currently schooling and it IS overwhelming trying to keep up with all that they need to accomplish each day nevermind every week, every month, or every term.  I just started using the Organizer this month, and though I am still “finding my way around” with it, the Organizer has given me  great peace of mind. I can see what I need to do, and I can see what each of my children need to do, as well.

I have 2 high schoolers, a middle schooler and 2 elementary students,  AND I switched over to full Charlotte Mason with mostly SCM rec’s over the Christmas break.  So far, the last two weeks have gone pretty well, but I don’t think I could have pulled off such a huge switch without the support of the Organizer.

I try to be frugal with our homeschooling budget, but I feel like the Organizer is an investment that allows me to do my job better and in turn makes our homeschool better.  Now if it could just get my teenaged son to follow through on his assignments, everything would be perfect. 🙂

Wow! Thanks for the great review, cdm2kk! (And everyone who answered!) 🙂

they let you try for 30 days free

Just a note that we changed this last June so that the free trial is limited by the number of resources you can schedule, rather than a time limit on the number of days you can use it. We wanted to offer a free version of the Organizer that you could try out without the pressure of a deadline.

Okay, all you SCM organizer users…can you please tell me… How does it work if you don’t get everything done that was scheduled!  How do you adjust it? Also, we will be doing school more year round and we have plenty of weeks that we do school 4 days a week,  is it easy to work around this type of schedule?  I am so glad you ladies are sharing your experience as I have been curious about the organizer.  I have also been trying to decide how to plan and get organized for next year!

It will absolutely work for a 4 day week and once you have your resources entered and scheduled, then you only check off what you completed and then those assignments are gone but any you didn’t complete just stay waiting for when you do get to them. Now there are 2 different ways to schedule your 4 days and this is where only you will know what you like best. Normally, you know which 4 days you will school, such as Mon-Thurs. So then when you schedule a resource, you mark which days you will use that resource and then when it is a Wednesday, only those resources you scheduled for Wednesday will show up on that day’s schedule making quite clear what you ideally want to cover for the day, but if you don’t get to a resource, well then that missed assignment will appear on the next day that resource is scheduled for. For instance, if you do poetry once a week on Wednesday then the missed assignment will show up again next Wednesday and you just continue on as though you really never missed anything. If the resource is one that you will do tue, wed, thur each week, then if you missed Wednesday’s assignment, then it will be there ready for you on Thursday and you just mark it off complete when you do it. No harm no foul. As you near the year’s end, you will finish off resources and some you will have 2 or 3 lessons to complete these will be those missed lessons and here you can choose to just have light days until they are finished OR since some resources are complete, you can double up your lessons on the single resource and finish it up too. This is how most people use it, but it seems my life always has a quirk to throw at me. LOL    The second way is my way and this is how I had to tweak the organizer to work for me and what I like. I schedule every resource for Mon-Sat (my husband works a rotating shift work and so I never know what days we will be schooling) I refuse to school on Sunday though. Anyway, so when I open my schedule any given day, it shows every resource, however when I enter how I want the resource done like “read together” I put something like this {day1}, {day3} 5 chapters per week – I then just keep track as to what day we are on for the week, day 1, day 2, day 3 etc. and I go through all the resources closing or clicking the little triangle button which closes up that resource until I’m left for which ones I am going to do that day and I can print this out, but I usually just mark off as we complete throughout the day. My way is way more complicated, but I like it because like the kids, sometimes I may have music set for that day, but I’m not in the mood and would rather do art and I can easily pick and choose giving me more control. None of our days are the same, but all our assignments are short and we move through fairly smoothly.   When kids are sick, I will even let them pick our daily resources. Just know that eventually everything will get done because like I said once you start eliminating resources, you can let your days get lighter or start doubling up on other resources to finish them quicker and then have more full days off. You make it yours.

There are 3 things that I try and not let kids (my kids are 4&5th grade) miss more than 3 days of simply because it is too hard to get them going again…. reading, math, and writing.    They always have a reader going and for math, we currently use Teaching textbooks and so I will have them do half lessons or if they finished for the year, I will go through and delete all the ones they missed and have them work through those again and we also do life of Fred math as a family, they write in a personal journal daily. I never grade the journal and I will just flip through it to make sure they are writing in it. I do this because I found that my early writers would forget how to form certain letters or when they learned cursive, they would forget if given a break of more than a few days and it was like pulling teeth to get them back on the daily habit. The math I noticed that they would loose or forget so much with a month off for summer and then they would need to pretty much learn those new concepts taught at the end of the year, so now we do really light math days during those off times and they do not have to re-learn or really review much to get back going full steam. You won’t see this until they are around 2-3 grade though. You work so hard to get those concepts down and it really hurts to have them forget a concept it took you 8 weeks to get mastered! LOL

Sometimes I have a resource cover 2 years and so that resource won’t end at the year’s end and will sit until I start back up for the next year and I love that I don’t have to do anything, but mark it complete. If you decide to stop a resource, you jut click remove resource from schedule and it is gone from your schedule but the unfinished lessons are still waiting for when you schedule that resource again OR you can remove it permanently from your library. That is what is awesome about this organizer is that you can add resources you are thinking about to your library so you don’t forget you have them, but until you schedule when you want them to start, you won’t see them on your daily plan.

You don’t have to have a date for each resource to start, just mark that you want to start this resource when that resource is done. This is why it doesn’t matter if you miss a reading because the next resource won’t start on a certain day, but only when a resource is complete. For instance, I like to have 3 history readers going at one time. So I take all my history reader resources for the year and add up their pages and divide by the # of weeks I want to read for….I shoot for 34 usually. Then I get how many pages per week I need to read. Let’s say it is 90 pages, so then I know that if I am going to have 3 readers going that I should read 30 pages per reader per week. This is what I write in my schedule [day1],[day2],[day3] 30p/w and I use little skinny post it note flags to mark that week’s 30 pages and then I will either read 10 pages a day or may read 20 if the story is good and double up another reader the net day.   If you are nervous about making those decisions daily and want a set plan, then you can schedule the resource for 7 pages Mon-thurs.  Anyway, I place the resources in the order that I want them read and then I make 3 stacks then when I enter them in I enter the first three resources and then mark which resource needs to start when that one is finished and I continue through all three stacks that way. Just those first three resources will start on a certain day, which is your first day of school. If you prefer to only have one resource going at a time but read more per day, that can be done too. That is why I am such a fan of this organizer. OH! I always do an advent book and so I have it start December 1st. So there are time when you may start a resource later in the year at a certain date to. Have a springtime fieldtrip or book you want to read, have it start at the appropriate time as well.

I promise you will forget what all you schedule until it pops up and then it is just so exciting and such a relief that you didn’t have to keep track of it.

I hope I didn’t throw too much at you, but I wanted to explain that the planning and entering is the hardest part and once you do that, then the rest of the year you just focus on teaching and life and all that is required is to mark off what you complete.  I usually give myself a month to gather all my resources and plan how I want to tackle each one and I separate them into subjects and then use a post it on each resource showing how I want to tackle it. Once I’ve done that then I start entering them in and I always do a search of the resource to see if someone has done the work for me and if so then I copy it and then tweak it to what I want it to be and then continue to the next resource.

Here is what my religion (catholic) looks like – I set up the bible for everyday and before I read we say a prayer and then I have a daily affirmation that we do and I just post this inside my bible – kids have it memorized by now but it just seems to set the day off in a positive way (Today is going to be a great day and I thank God for giving me this day. I am going to learn things today. I am going to do things today and try and be the person God created me to be. I am going to apply myself here at home and within my community and when I am confronted with a problem or a conflict, I will think before I react. I accept the challenges of this day with a happy heart and will strive to do God’s will today.) I also do scripture memorization daily. (I use scripturebox.com for $5 a year and it is beyond wonderful. I set up all the scripture I want to memorize and then they email which ones we do each day) This is CM way of scripture memorization I believe and it works! Then day 1 I do a faith formation teaching or CCD (church rules basically explains mass why we believe what we believe) type lesson, day 2 I read about a saint, day 3 We pray a rosary or a chaplet etc. day 4 character development day 5 character development day 6 character development

So day 1 is prayer, affirmation, scripture memory, bible and CCD lesson

day 2 is prayer, affirmation, scripture memory, bible and saint reader(this is similar to the Protestant’s missionary stories)

day 3 is prayer, affirmation, scripture memory, bible, longer in depth prayer (I include prayers for sick of our parish and we list family members or friends who have passed on and then I list those that have asked for prayers from me either on FB or through conversations etc. and then my kids will add those that they want to pray for.

day4 is prayer, affirmation, scripture memory, bible, character development (I have used different things, but usually laying down the rails, readers that cover characters traits such as those lamplighter sells. Next year I’m doing Beautiful Girlhood by Karen Andreola

day 5 & day 6 are optional and may or may not get done done but would be like day 4.

So everyday is the same and yet different. Religion takes about 20-30 minutes for us, which for my age kids is just right.

If you made it through this novel, then you are determined and will figure it all out for sure! LOL Best of Luck and I hope this helped.

Trust me when I say that if you follow CM principles when planning your own curriculum, you will do better than fine and you will enjoy it and will be able to breathe!

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!  I will try it out to finish out this year to get a feel for it, but it sounds great!  I also plan by labeling day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4 and day 5!  If we take a day off, it is typically in Friday, but we like the flexibility of it much better than Mon through Friday!  I would also prefer to do more planning up front and less throughout the year.  But, because I teach each child and go at their pace I need flexibility!  Also the freedom to linger in a subject and go more in depth if we want to is important to me!  We will start schooling year round this next year, but we will have about 6 weeks off between this year and next!  I hope to use that time to I out everything!  Right now I am working with a planner that I out together myself!  It has worked really well but doesn’t offer the flexibility of something like the organizer!  When we had to make spchanges, I would have to erase or cross out and redo the schedule and sometimes those changes impacted the next week!  I pretty much plan a few weeks out so every few weeks I was I putting everything.  I would so much prefer to just do the bulk of it before the school year.  Thank you so much cdm2kk!  I appreciate all your help:)