Organizing My Homeschool Year- Part 1

I have been thinking a lot lately about organization.  I personally love to organize and I love having everything in its proper place.  I have a label maker, and most everything in our school area is labeled.

I thought I would take today and share a little bit about how I organize our space.  We are blessed to have a home that has an extra room in our finished basement.  We use that as our school room, it also has an attached storage room that we use for extra storage for our school items.  Our room is approximately 13 x 13, and the storage room is about 13 x 8.5.

I'll first share how I organize my planner. I created my own homeschool lesson planner this year, which is free to you to download if you would like!  Just follow this link!  I printed it all off, hole punched it and placed it in a 1" three ring binder.  It is divided into four main sections.  The first section is my lesson plans.

Next is the lesson schedules I created.  I have our read aloud schedule, Letter of the Week Schedule, What's in the Bible videos and what history lesson they correspond with, etc.

In the next section is my Calendar and Attendance trackers.  I also have our Year in Review page in this section.

My last section is extra records that I am keeping this year.  I have a Book Log, Field Trip log, and a course of study for each child.

Next, I'll share how I organize the Letter of the Week curriculum that we are using for Zach.  First I created a hanging file folder for each letter of the alphabet and for each literature unit we will be using.  I then put them in my cute Thirty-One Gifts fold n file.  I just printed off the first 12 weeks of school right now.  So all of those are filed into the appropriate folder.  I also went ahead and laminated the things that I wanted laminated.

After that I printed off the lesson plans and hole punched them and put them in a 1/2" three ring binder.  I created two sections in this binder one is the lesson plans and one is extra resource pages that go along with the Letter of the Week curriculum.

Next up, is my little storage room off the school room.  This summer it went through a major overhaul.  We use this area to store our craft supplies, curriculum that we aren't currently using and our records.  This year I also moved my sons' desks into this little room.  It serves as a great barrier from our main room, while still allowing them to be close by.

Here is an overview of the shelves.

Top Left:  Craft supplies

Top Middle:  More craft supplies and paints, paint brushes, extra crayons, and pencils.
Middle Shelf:  More crafts supplies and some pocket chart
games.

Top Right:  File boxes with their completed work, wall posters are on top of that.
The wooden box is a set of fancy silverware that never gets used.
Middle Right:  All About Spelling and Reading, Math U See, MFW Kindergarten,
and some general 2nd grade materials.  I also have some rolls of paper that I got from
Ikea a few years ago!  This stuff lasts for ever and is super cheap!

Middle Middle:  Construction paper, no tip water pots, extra school supplies,
science kits.
Bottom Middle:  Scratch paper one tub of white and one of colored,
reading games, weaving loom.

Middle Left: File folders, extra colored pencils, magnifying glasses, US Bingo,
book ends, and other items not currently in use.
Bottom Left:  Extra clip boards, white boards, and chalk boards.  Along with
some left over duct tape.  

That about sums up our craft organization.  As you can see I use my label maker a lot!  I also like to use clear bins in order to see what is inside at a glance.  I started the summer with about 8 or 10 of those file boxes and I got down to 6!  **I realized that I forgot to get a picture of the bottom right side of the shelves, on that side I just have another 2 boxes of extra school supplies and items that we aren't currently using.  We also have a microscope on that shelf next to those boxes.**

In my next post I will share how my boys desks are organized and how my desk is organized.  I also plan to share how I organize my teachers manuals and things like that.  So be sure to check back in!

The Summer Crazies... Organizing, Purging, and Planning

I've come to think that this summer will not be as restful as I had hoped!  Last week became so busy! We had two weeks of Bible school in a row, and last week little Zach was sick.  So between baseball, a sick kid and bible school we are exhausted!!

I am looking forward to this week and having no plans at all!  I am looking forward to some rest and checking some more items off of our bucket list.

I have also slowly, very slowly, been revamping our school room.  I began by doing some major purging.  To say that I was a bit of a curriculum hoarder is an understatement!  So I have come to the conclusion that less is more.  I went from having about 10 boxes of unused homeschool items down to 4 boxes of items that I am saving for future use or record keeping.

This is the mess that I was making.

Since moving into our new home last fall I put very little thought into the arrangement of our school room, and needless to say it was not working too well for us.  I have been moving furniture and arranging items and having so much fun doing it!  Stay tuned to see the finished product in a few weeks!

We were able to purchase some new items for our school room from the money made by purging the unused items.  I am excited about these new trofast systems from Ikea that we were able to buy.

I am hoping to get everything put back together this week and share the finished product by the end of next week.  After that I will be putting together our curriculum for next year and getting ready to begin school at the beginning of August.  Wow, that will be here too soon!  My kids are already asking to start school!  Not yet kiddos, this mom needs a break!  

Our "School Room"

When we decided to homeschool I had wonderful visions of what I wanted in our school room.  I knew I would not get a room, so then came the thoughts of where could I go.  I had thoughts of using our basement, but its not finished and in order to finish it off it would cost a chunk of money, not to mention there are no windows!  Then I thought about using the babies room and moving him in with his older bothers, but I am just not quite ready for that yet.  So in the mean time I came up with using a corner of our dining room, which was already used for storing their coloring books and homework supplies anyway.  We use the work box system, so both of my boys have their work box carts in the dining room.  In each of the boxes are their work books and on top of their carts they each get a pencil box which holds 3 pencils, an eraser and dry erase markers.  All of their art supplies are in a separate place since I didn't want to buy double of everything.

To the left on the wall is our calendar board.  The carts with the colorful drawers are their workboxes.  Preschool one on the left and 2nd grader on the right.  The middle drawers hold coloring books, highlights magazines, and other miscellaneous items.  The globe I found at a garage sale for $1.50, only to get home and  have my hubby point out that its outdated, it still has East and West Germany!  HA!!  Oh well, it was cheap!

Here is our calendar board, I am thinking its going to need a bit more dressing up!  I am also using the "Day's in School" chart, "Today's Weather Is" chart, and the "Todays Temperature" chart, all from www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com.

Second came the question of where are we going to store the books, and manipulative's that come along with homeschooling?  We have a closet in our hallway that was really not used for much except a place to "hide" things.  So I cleaned that out and it has become our "closet", aka the place where their manipulative's are.  These are games, puzzles, and toys that only come out during what we call "closet time".

Lots of games, puzzles, flashcards, pattern blocks, geo boards....

This is the top shelf of the closet, this is where I keep our art supplies.

 I was able to find an amazing solid wood bookcase at a second hand store for an even more amazing price!  I was super excited!  So that is in our living room and holds our books.  I have our school binders, teacher manuals, story books and reference books all on here.  Also the bottom two shelves are for the babies toys, and books.  Which is why in the picture they are empty!  :)

Yup the baby loves to pull everything off!!  

We also have a computer in the dining room, which is used for school work.  Its a really old eMac that my hubby got on ebay for $35!!  I am really proud of him for finding such an amazing deal, it works great for the kiddos and its allowed us to be able to better control which websites they go to.

That about sums up where we do school, well so far!  We have only been doing school for about a week.  :)

This post is participating in the iHomeschool Networks Not Back to School Blog Hop!!  You can find more great "school rooms" here.