The Canadian Homeschool Blogging Team is continuing to share monthly blog posts and I am so pleased to be part of this team in its second year!
This month's topic is organization. Over the last 10 years of homeschooling, I have tried many different organization systems, from Homeschool Tracker to trying to set up a homeschool room in a basement! I have learned what works for us, and now that I only homeschool one child, it is even more simple.
For me, organization comes under different categories...planning, storing, etc..so I have organized (ah!) this post into three categories:
How we organize our year:
I call this the master plan. Before the school year starts, I sit down and plan the year ahead. I often get Celeste involve in this process, asking for her input, especially for subjects like history and science. Once we have decided what to study and which resources/curriculum to use, I figure out how often we need to do a subject in order to accomplish our goals and studies. This master plan helps us stay organized. For example, we know that Math should be done every day in order to cover all the lessons.
How we organize our days:
We have re-organized our routine recently, mixing things around a little. In order to remember this, I made a little chart for us. This is a simple visual sign that also keeps us organized. You can read more about that here.
I like to keep track of what we do. I have used a homeschool planner for years for this purpose. I used to have different colour pens for each of my kids and wrote down each day what they accomplished. Now that I only have Celeste at home, I have moved to writing what we do down in my bullet journal, for each day, in the little day squares on the month view pages. It works for us at this time.
How we organize our "stuff":
For storing, I have used bookshelves for our current books and curriculum. In our current house, these shelves are in our family room. I like to organize our bookshelves by topic, in other words all the history books are together.
We also keep science tools and art supplies handy, on the bookshelves. It makes it easier to locate things when we want them.
I have a little storage cabinet in our basement for curriculum that is not current but that I might use in the future or sell.
For past completed work, I have plastic bins that I use. One bin per child and that has worked well so far. I don't save every single piece of work.
That is my overall ideas for how I stay organized in our homeschool. I can't wait to see the other blog posts from the Canadian Homeschool Blogging Team!
You can see the list of posts with links from the participating blogger at the Canadian Homeschooler.
One last thing! I did a periscope broadcast about this exact topic, if you like to watch it and see some of the things I wrote about:
This month's topic is organization. Over the last 10 years of homeschooling, I have tried many different organization systems, from Homeschool Tracker to trying to set up a homeschool room in a basement! I have learned what works for us, and now that I only homeschool one child, it is even more simple.
For me, organization comes under different categories...planning, storing, etc..so I have organized (ah!) this post into three categories:
How we organize our year:
I call this the master plan. Before the school year starts, I sit down and plan the year ahead. I often get Celeste involve in this process, asking for her input, especially for subjects like history and science. Once we have decided what to study and which resources/curriculum to use, I figure out how often we need to do a subject in order to accomplish our goals and studies. This master plan helps us stay organized. For example, we know that Math should be done every day in order to cover all the lessons.
How we organize our days:
We have re-organized our routine recently, mixing things around a little. In order to remember this, I made a little chart for us. This is a simple visual sign that also keeps us organized. You can read more about that here.
I like to keep track of what we do. I have used a homeschool planner for years for this purpose. I used to have different colour pens for each of my kids and wrote down each day what they accomplished. Now that I only have Celeste at home, I have moved to writing what we do down in my bullet journal, for each day, in the little day squares on the month view pages. It works for us at this time.
How we organize our "stuff":
For storing, I have used bookshelves for our current books and curriculum. In our current house, these shelves are in our family room. I like to organize our bookshelves by topic, in other words all the history books are together.
We also keep science tools and art supplies handy, on the bookshelves. It makes it easier to locate things when we want them.
I have a little storage cabinet in our basement for curriculum that is not current but that I might use in the future or sell.
For past completed work, I have plastic bins that I use. One bin per child and that has worked well so far. I don't save every single piece of work.
That is my overall ideas for how I stay organized in our homeschool. I can't wait to see the other blog posts from the Canadian Homeschool Blogging Team!
You can see the list of posts with links from the participating blogger at the Canadian Homeschooler.
One last thing! I did a periscope broadcast about this exact topic, if you like to watch it and see some of the things I wrote about:
I didn't get a chance to watch your whole broadcast, but yay - Periscope! I'm a chicken and haven't tried it yet haha. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your wisdom and tips this month. :)
I haven't figured out periscope yet. :) you have a good system in place I think.
ReplyDelete