A blog that I have gained quite a bit of useful information from pertaining to homeschooling, home organization, and other responsibilities of motherhood is We Are THAT Family. Each Wednesday she hosts a gathering of ideas that “work.”
The theme for this week’s Works for Me Wednesday is organization, probably an area in which even the most organized among us can benefit from some fresh ideas.
Another great pool of information is at Five J’s Thirsty Thursday posting. You can find a handful of great tips and inspiration to help in the enriching of our kids’ minds. Today Joy starts out with some great ideas about how to handle a student who is feeling overwhelmed.
Two items my homeschool organization depends on regularly are paperclips and post-it notes. These simple objects have saved my sanity more than once.
Here are just a sampling of places you will find them in my homeschool room:
– Marking pages in the text book. Rather than have to flip back and forth to find the current lesson, we mark it with a paper clip and we quickly jump to the right page. And, they stay put a lot better than most book marks.
– Marking individual lessons in one multi-use book. When I have many kids at different places in one book (like Spelling Power), I use color coded paperclips to mark each child’s lesson. They each have their own color for these types of things (folders, paperclips, binders, etc.) Blake is red, Paige is pink, etc. We all just know these things since they have been in place for so long now.
– Highlighting questions or topics that we don’t want to skip over. A strategically placed post-it note jogs my memory when we read through a lesson or book together.
– Post it notes divide up their binders like file tabs. They are so much easier to move around, relabel and personalize than other purchased notebook tabs
Do you have any other simple organizational tools that you depend on in your homeschool? Please share!
Barnes and Noble has a free ebook reader available right now. Also, when you download it and create an account you also get six free ebooks including Little Women and Pride and Prejudice.
Just looking over the E-Reader quickly, I am excited about using this tool to read and organize the many ebooks that I have come to acquire. The program gives you a way to organize your books on various “bookshelves” and while reading you may jump to certain pages and chapters as you desire. Also, you can take notes as you read for future reference.
For free, there is not much to complain about in this handy device which you can download to your phone or computer. And, since Little Women was on our list to read this year, that comes as an added bonus.
Summer tends to be planning season in homeschooling households, and just in time for the formulating frenzy, The Old Schoolhouse has released its brand new 2009 Schoolhouse Planner.
This planner offers far more than stability and structure for your homeschool days. As we all know, the role of mother, home manager, teacher, negotiator, etc. overlap throughout each day. And, likewise, the parameters of the 2009 Schoolhouse Planner stretch into these roles as well.
A sampling of what you will enjoy with this tool:
Calendars — including ideas appropriate for each month from July (starting in just a couple weeks!) through June 2010; yearly calendars up to 2012; along with recipes and resources appropriate for each month
Inspiration — from well known homeschool authors (including Jay Wile and Amanda Bennett), addressing topics pertinent to homeschool families.
Must-know lists and compiled charts — from presidents to cloud types to geographical terms, the periodical table as well as miracles and parables.
Record Keeping — fill in schedules (for two, three, four, and five children), grade tracking, field trip planning, activity managers, inventory sheets, goals, etc. This book offers 120 pages of homeschool related forms and schedules!
Household help — they don’t send a person, but all of these resources can help everything run more smoothly. This also gives you a place and format to compile essential information. They help you organize chores, medical information, schedules, menus, gardening, pets, parties, and budgets. Over 60 pages of these useful tools.
Each of the forms is made to either print and write on, or type right onto and print out filled in, whatever you prefer. You can save your changes for further modification, or to build on, or print and save the hard copy.
The only downside I have found is that if you want to keep more than one computer based copy of one of the forms, you would need to save the whole planner more than once on your computer. Since I plan on storing hard copies of the record sheets, this did not diminish its usefulness for me, but it was something I had to consider when printing out the various copies for each of my kids. However, if you own a copy of Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader, the free download, but a rather expensive software), it has the capability of saving individual pages in modified format.
I have big plans for organizing this summer and pulling together all the information and strategies that I need for the year ahead. This wonderful planner has given me the framework and tools to make it all a reality. I had already started before receiving the planner, but the 2009 Schoolhouse Planner has done a lot of the work for me, and now I don’t need to go searching all over the internet to get it done, making my precious planning time even more efficient.
And, since it is all in an ebook format you can print and reprint the various pages as you need to keep them visible around your home and keep your family all on the same page.
All of these resources, 375 overflowing pages, are packed into this one e-book for $39.00. You would want to purchase it soon to take full advantage of the planning and ideas available even to enrich your celebration and study of the Fourth of July, and to have all the information in place for the new school year.