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Organizing Your Home School
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I enjoyed today’s blog post about organizing our individual schools. Sonya sat down with her friend and co-worker, Laura to discuss how they each organize their schools. I’m always fascinated to learn how others organize and often inspired to make adjustments. We live in a small house (by American standards) with 4 kiddos, 3 dogs, and 2 cockatiels. Space is a premium and I’ve learned that keeping everything (for school) in its place is vital to usher in a smooth day. I have a 3-shelf rolling cart that I keep all of my resources on. This includes our together resources, my teacher planning book (which I use to record what we do each day), and the resources I’ll need later in the year. Each of my older students has a “basket” that they keep their resources in. They are fairly independent so this works well for them. My 3rd child is almost 6. I currently keep supplies for him on top of a dresser in our dining room. I found that when I kept them on a shelf or in my cart, I brushed his needs aside and just didn’t sit down with him to work on letter sounds, etc. I hate to admit this but the reality is that his stuff was out of site out of mind…or easy to brush to the side. Putting it in a highly visible area definitely gives me the daily nudge to spend time focused on him.
We used to keep a memory binder for each student but I dropped it about 1.5 years ago when life became hectic. Laura has inspired me to get back to the binders.
How about you guys? How do you organize your school?
(okay….another closely held secret….I, like Laura, find it easy to put nature study off! I totally have a reason to go buy a tackle box now!)
I have a small office filled with bookshelves and a small table to dedicate to school stuff. Each child has a shelf for all their books and a basket to hold other things like pencil boxes, markers, paints, etc.
Other supplies like art stuff, paper, math sets, etc. are kept in a tall plastic organizer with drawers.
I have a white board on the wall where I write the week’s memory verse and a big bulletin board to pin art work on.
Each child also has a planner where I write down what is expected of them each day. This way they know what to do and can check it off. This is for independent work. They keep these in their shelves.
Then I have a master planner in a clipboard with everyone’s plans on it and also group subjects. We do the majority of our school work at the dining room table, and the clipboard is always there for me to reference.
I have a book shelf in the kitchen that has a special shelf for homeschool books currently in use. In times past, more than one shelf may have been needed but I am down to one student, so one shelf is enough. I have a planner that both my daughter and I use together. She also has a portfolio where any loose leaf assignments are kept. I keep a running list of books read in our planner. I keep our devotional and our memory verses in a book box by our couch as that is where we have family devotions. My daughter keeps all of her art supplies in her desk in her room.
We have bookshelves everywhere and I have organized them by topic but they never seem to stay that way!
That’s pretty much it for us!
Each child and myself has a desk to hold current year books. I also have a school supply cabinet which has teacher books for other years. We have bookshelves anywhere I can squeeze one in. Another shelf has games and puzzles. Before we got our desks, we used the dinning room table or living room couch and workboxes for independent work and a shelf for our family work. We still use the table and couch for some family subjects though.
For years, we have used individual planners. I learned to buy each planner to look differently so I don’t accidentally write one student’s work in another’s planner! And I learned to not write any more than one week’s plans at one time. Something always changes. I do have a general plan for the year in mind ahead of time. I have planning ideas in a simple spiral notebook. Well…lots of notebooks now. I actually have a hard time keeping these notebooks straight. Our plans are subject to change as needed.
I like the rolling cart idea. This would be great for arts and crafts items, too. I love the idea of having the nature study supplies ready to go. I may use a backpack on wheels for this, with a small plastic pencil box for the pencils and paints. Great idea to add wipes, bandages, etc.
We live in a smaller home but have been able to create a dedicated school space with desks for individual studies as well as use the couch nearby for family reading time in our basement. It is unfinished but usable space. Each of the kids has a book shelf they can decorate and holds current in use books and curriculum, and a desk. For us, a dedicated space works great because it reduces distractions for me and the kids. Allows us to get to work, finish up, and then have free time.
Books that are not in current use for school (which are in the school area) are all in the main living space in our living room and by our kitchen table, on shelves mounted on the wall. People walk in and know we read a lot, haha. I sometimes think about moving all the books downstairs to the school area, but find having them in the place we spend the majority of our free time lends itself to reading for pleasure, just picking up a book for the fun of it, grabbing a book about a subject instead of asking to look it up online.
For day to day I created a schedule in xcel and every Friday or Sunday afternoon I fill out a schedule for each of the kids for the following week. It allows them to know what is expected to accomplish, so they can get to work on individual studies, but planning only a week at a time allows for flexibility for what ever might come up. I have a big picture list of what we want to accomplish for the year, which curriculum and books to finish, but only schedule one week at a time.
Sarah, when you walk into our home you are immediately in the living room, which is open to the dining room. Our bookshelves bank one entire wall in the living room and there is a smaller bookshelf in the dining room with our nature study/nature lore books. There is no denying to anyone who walks into our home that books are valued here. 🙂
Wings2fly,
Each year, my older children get a spiral notebook that has a different colored cover. They keep this in their basket but bring it to me every for their daily school tasks. I have a master list of what subject I ideally hope to cover each day whether it is our “together” items or their independent work. I used the free weekly planner download (scroll almost all the way down) for my master list.
Tamara – Yep that sounds about like our house. What is funny is that my husband does not read for pleasure. I keep thinking with all the books around one day he might read for pleasure, but even if not, he is glad the kids all enjoy reading. He grew up in a house with probably less than 10 books so chuckles at the growing book collection but sees the positives so does not discourage the invasion of books, haha.
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