The Method Behind the Madness

I love looking at how people have their homeschool stuff organized. Someday (maybe even this week) I'll paint the room we use for homeschooling and then show you the entire room, but until then, I'll let you see some bits and pieces. All of these ideas are things that I've thought of or that I've cobbled together from other people's ideas. What works for people is so individual that I haven't ever been able to take someone's whole idea and just implement it. I always have to tweak things first.

So, each child has a notebook:

Harry and Sam's are recycled from last year, Annika and Emma's are new this year. Emma doesn't really need one because she's only three but she really wants one. So for peace in my little corner of the world, she gets one.

I love scrapbooking supplies, but don't actually scrapbook, so this is my chance to buy the stuff and not feel guilty. The paper is new each year. At the end of the year, I rubber band their old work with the paper on top. That way when they are 30-something their kids can look at the old work they did and mock them. (Not that that's happened to me and if it did, I'm not bitter at all.)

That's all well and good (and a little bit fancy), but how do I use the notebooks?

Let's look inside:

This is the inside of Harry's notebook. He has tabs labeled for each book he uses (not each subject) and one labeled "Today." That will hold the work he is to complete each day. On top of the "today" tab, there will be an assignment sheet each day. This is the link to Harry's sheet. I plan to print these onto different color paper for each child. (Except Emma, she doesn't get one.) I also pretty the pages up with silly clip art and never fill in every single square. For a visual kid to see my writing in all of those square is death. That's why there are so many.

As far as my organization goes, I use something like this. This one is from Sam's third term of last year. I don't have this year's finished yet. Very basic, but they keep me on track plus it's easy for me to draw arrows if we didn't finished something during the week it was scheduled. Not pretty, but it works for me.

I plan nine weeks at a time. Any fewer than that and it feels like I'm doing major planning too often. And more than that never goes well. I don't pull things apart because then I'd be completely drowning in paper, but anything I have that's printed I put in a file box, like this:

I don't know how well you can see, but the tabs are labeled Harry-1, Harry-2 etc and repeating also for Sam and Annika. I also have folders labeled Harry, Sam, Annika future. That's for stuff beyond the nine weeks I'm thinking of.

This is what's in Harry's week two folder:

This is his map activity for Sumer I think and his Classical House of Learning assignment sheets. Some weeks have a lot in them, some weeks hardly anything. There will also be more later once I get all of their books and everything completely scheduled.

Once Harry actually does his work he'll put it behind the labeled tab and I'll check it over . If we need to talk about anything, we will, if not, hey, cool!

Hope you enjoyed the quick tour through my organization system. And I hope it continues to work this year too!