Homeschool Organization

hi YouTube today I want to talk curriculum organization with you you've seen from previous videos how our homeschool room is set up this is the table where we do our main school work and then behind me on the shelves our cubbies where I keep all of my curriculum that I'm not using or they're planning on using at some point but I wanted to talk today about what do you do with all of the daily stuff so I'm going to show you what we're planning to use this year for my first grader and my preschooler um I didn't come up with all this on my own so I can't take full credit for it some of these ideas especially the crate idea I've gotten from Kristi clover at raising clovers so she gets the credit for this I don't know if she got it from somebody or if she came up with on her own but I'm borrowing that idea from her and then I want to show you just a couple of things on how I tweaked it to work for me she has more older school-age kiddos than I do so her system is set up a little bit differently so I'm just going to show you how we organize our everyday materials um so the first thing I do when I'm getting curriculum set up is I make my little spreadsheet this is my whole year at a glance on three pages there's the first 12 weeks the second 12 weeks and the last 12 weeks something about like that um and I have each of my subjects along the top and then every week just a really quick overview on what we're gonna do literally on math it'll say like lesson five but this is my full year to glean so this is kind of what I'm using is my main foundational lesson plan outline for the year so that's what I have all of this information will get transposed into my son's weekly checklist and I showed you this before several times but this seems to be a popular handy thing and this is something that I did kind of come up with on my own a veteran homeschool mom recommended this to me last year when I was struggle helping my kindergartner know exactly kind of what he needed to be doing I know he's not going to do things independently all the time but I wanted him to kind of have an idea so she recommended making a checklist for him so this is what I came up with so at the beginning of each week or every couple of weeks I'll go through and fill out exactly what he's going to be doing on each day so the he knows and then he can check this off I have another video on this that has links if you want to get a copy of this checklist so that's how I'm going to organize kind of my my lesson plans I'm not doing a traditional lesson plan book like I did last year it's going to mostly be on his checklist and then I'm going to use my week at a glance so once I have that stuff done then that's where this crate system comes in and this is what I saw from Christy that I'm going to try and use this year so I just had a file crate that was sitting around probably from my former classroom and I got 36 hanging files in here because we have 36 weeks of school that's just how our calendar works out and so each one is labeled you can see all the way back to week 36 but then if I take out the week 1 folder inside of that folder are two separate file folders my son the first layer is green and my preschool age daughter is purple I let them pick their colors these will be their colors forever so they can never change their favorite ropes these are the colors that they're going to go with color coding really helps me to see easily at a glance who's doing what who's supposed to have what so um in each folder then for each week and you'll notice this folder is labeled because I can keep 36 of these in order these are not there's nothing on the labels for these they'll just stay in the week 1 folder but then if they for some reason get put somewhere else I don't have to try and go back and sort all of these and you'll notice that for my son I started since he's the oldest using the left-side tab and my daughter has the middle tab and then when my third comes along when she's old enough for school she'll get this tab and then eventually I guess we'll have to start over but that's okay so it's just easy for me to see what's in them so in each of these folders I'm going to use my son's as my example because he has more work to do when I opened this up this is just all of his loose worksheets that he's going to work on for that week so you kind of have to know what you're going to work on every week ahead of time and obviously things will sometimes change and we'll have to kind of see how that works but like first on his stack these are all of his pages for our grapevine study then he has whatever math pages he has for the week his handwriting pages are in here and then his writing for his writing with ease curriculum is in here I might throw some science and history pages in here that's one thing that I might keep separate because I don't know exactly how fast we're going to be able to go so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself but this is all his loose work so what I envisioned him doing is sitting down on Tuesday when we start school taking everything out of his folder and then dividing it up in four separate just like pocket folders like you always had when you're a kid in school which I haven't gotten yet because we don't have school supplies out yet but we start on Tuesday today is the end the end of the first week in July and we're starting school on Tuesday so hopefully now that the 4th of July is over school supplies Aliyah so we're going to go school supply shopping next week so I'm envisioning him taking and sitting down and looking at his weekly checklist and saying okay we're going to do this part of the grapevine study on on Tuesday Sigma and Tuesday folder that way if we're out or we need to do school upstairs or something he can literally just take that one folder take it with him and he has everything to go he can just clip it on a clipboard or whatever he needs to do with it so that's where all of his work is going to be is in the folders my daughter's obviously has a lot less in it for now she just has her grapevine Studies here because math and she'll be doing math phonics and handwriting but I'm not going to push her to go at a certain speed so I don't want to try and keep those in weekly order that she wanted purple folders and she'll have to follow along with where we are in Bible so I just split those all up for her so those will go together and they go in my week 1 folder and then one week one is over then we'll keep the papers that need to be kept and we'll recycle the papers that don't and then it can go in the back and then we'll just always have our week in the front um so I had a lot of anxiety doing this because ripping apart notebooks makes me really nervous but we're going to try it it makes a lot of sense to me I like the color-coded organization of this so we're going to see how it works not everything obviously is taken apart I'm not going to rip apart my teachers manuals if someone wants to convince me that I should do that I'm willing to listen but I don't know if I can handle that yet so I do have teachers manuals and that kind of stuff that's where this rack comes in um and I've shown this in another video too and hopefully you can see that this is a racking that I used to use in my classroom they are baker's racks that you can put cookie sheets or cutting boards or whatever in but they work perfectly for putting books and stuff in here so I've kind of divided up my subjects my Bible binder is at the front these are mostly teachers manual so this is stuff I won't always have to get out then I have kind of a whole language arts chunk section here science and history is here and then these are my preschoolers workbooks but you can see there's her math she's going to start handwriting without tears and explode the code um so hers are kind of in that section there I might put these on her preschool table later on but for now they're just kind of sitting right up so that way when we're working at our table he can have his folder of worksheets and then if I need to refer to a teacher's manual it's right here and I don't have to go find out on my shelf of other stuff so we can pretty much just sit here every day and get our stuff done or we can take our look few things that we need and go to another room and house if we want to do that um so that's kind of it for what I'm planning on using for my organization I just wanted you to see how I have my create system set up this is probably not the cheapest thing that you're gonna do because you have to buy at least two boxes of your hanging file folders to get its unless you only need like 25 so I had a few of those laying around and then the colored folders were 15 bucks a box for a box of 100 and you only need 36 but I figure at some point we'll use them for something else um but I also figured if this works this is what we're going to do this will probably be part of my setup for a long time so it was worth the investment but otherwise it wasn't hard to do I had again what as I was putting stuff in the weeks I just referred to my little guide for the weeks that are off like Matt when he has a unit test then it's not exactly the right week so I just used that is my guide as I was filling these and if I sat down and did a subject it probably took me I don't know ten minutes tops for each subject and most of them I set while I was watching TV or what my kids were playing or whatever um so this is new to us this year and I'm really excited about it and so I hope it works good I'll try and remember to update it as we're going along during the course of our year and tell you if it's working or go ahead and make changes to it but hopefully again it gives us some flexibility if we need to take extra time off nothing is dated in here we can just push a week back so that's our plan for this year if you have questions don't hesitate to leave a comment and I'll try and get back to you otherwise don't forget to Like and subscribe happy homeschooling

Channel: Megan Phillips

Views: 33,771

Rating: 4.9042735 out of 5

Keywords: homeschool, organization, home school, curriculum organization, curriculum, organizing, planning, ideas, idea, room, set up, tour, crate, system, file, folders, daily, work, elementary

Id: jBHmQ1Qlxsw

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 09 2016