How Our Kids Teach THEMSELVES | Homeschool Binder System

if you are looking for a way to have your kids be a little bit more self-directed in their learning while taking a load off of your shoulders come hang out with me today while I walk you through our binder system that I created this year allowing them to teach themselves hi I'm Erin I'm a homeschooling mom to four kids ages 6 to 14. we've been homeschooling from the very beginning and from the very beginning I have tried a planner system to help keep our lesson plans in order keep track of all of our records all other things that did not work so well for me I transitioned to a reverse planning or record-keeping method where then we just kind of wrote down in my normal homeschool planner what we had done each day for all of the subjects and that worked pretty well but I still found myself falling off that bandwagon and not being able to keep on track with everything this year I really wanted to take that pressure off myself and figure out a way that I could keep accurate records for our homeschool of all the things that we've been doing but also giving my kids a way to have them take more ownership and more control of their own education I really want to teach them those life skills that they're going to need to help organize their time set priorities and goals and accomplish all the things that they need to do so that when they move on they have all of those skills in place without just someone having to tell them what to do each day so enter our binder system and that's what I'm going to walk through with you today how we have transitioned now into a way that they can have a binder they have this plan laid out for them and then they take it and run with it and get all of their work done totally independent of me for the most part I want you to note that what I have on here is going to be different than what you have every home school is different the number of lessons that you plan for each week are going to be different depending on the curriculum you use and all of those things I will have links in the description below to my website where you can find downloads of these printouts available for yourself the downloads that I have for you are editable you can change them and input the categories that you want to have on there or the number of lessons that you want to do each week that kind of thing it's up to you so all three of my boys have one of these binders our daughter who is in first grade does not because she is still learning how to read so I'm still having to really direct her education so let's look inside and I'll show you how all other things work for us these are what our binders look like they're just I think one and a half inch binder you don't definitely don't need that big I have it bigger because we have our language arts is printed out and in their binder but if you don't have like that you could just use a very small one um whatever works for you I Had Each my kids designed their own cover on the computer and then we printed those out for them um and they all have their own color now these we keep on our school cart that is in their kitchen next to our dining table where we have all of the books and things that our kids are actively working on so it's all right in one place easy to get to easy to see what they need when they need it and when it's time for school they can just pick up their binder open it up and see what it is they need to work on for the week so in our front cover here Lincoln has his Bible study we've been using the not consumed Bible studies and they are fantastic this fits in here so it's nice and easy to keep it together and then I just have these little transparent writers they have their weekly checklist this checklist is kind of the Hub of our homeschool this is something that I do have to plan ahead a little bit so normally on Sunday evenings I will sit down and plug in here the things that I want them to do for the upcoming week this gives them that guideline for knowing exactly what they need to do without having to come to me 50 times a day asking me what do I do now I don't have time for that I have four kids that I need to work with and this has been a lifesaver in helping us to get all of that off my plate off my mind it's all laid out here already when the week starts so that I don't have to sit and think through what we need to be doing next all throughout the day it is organized and nicely done here and now at the end of the year we will have all of these checklists that I can just take out of their binder and then insert into their folders that I keep for their records for each school year so we will be able to keep track of all of the things that they have worked on over the whole homeschool year for us at the top of the page I have the date for the week and then you can see we have the categories of Monday through Friday and right under the date I start having listed the subjects that we're going to be working on for that week most of these are pretty much the same every week other than the actual assignments right next to the subject I have the number of times that I want the kids to do a lesson in that subject each week the way we do our homeschooling there isn't always a lesson number or a chapter number that kind of thing that they need to do I just want to make sure they are doing a certain thing a certain number of times per week so that's why I have that indicated on here and then I also have listed out like copywork spelling grammar all of those things are fall under the category of language arts which we do at least one component of that each day of the week A lot of times it's two or maybe even three components of language arts and then for us then we have literature three times a week this is a signed reading that I give them a book most of these kind of go along with the history that we're doing um it's just kind of a chapter book that they read to go along with their lessons and then history you can see on ours is a little bit different because we do Charlotte Mason style lessons particularly for history and science so they have three lessons per week of each of those subjects and then each day you can see over on the category I have R and B and that is for reading the chapter that is assigned the n is for narration which is when they come and recite back to me narrate back to me all of the things that they learned from that lesson that week and that is how I can gauge their comprehension from what they read what they learned what they found interesting from their assignment that day and then the b stands for Book of centuries the book of centuries is basically a history timeline I've shared about these history timeline notebooks before I will link this in the description below if you want to see these they will go and plug in their on their history timeline or book of centuries is what Charlotte Mason calls them um the dates and names and events that they learned about particularly in history that week and then they will have this as a record to keep building on and working on throughout their homeschool years we were doing German using Duolingo which I did talk about in a homeschool favorites video a few weeks ago and and then a few people brought to my attention that there was some questionable content in some of it which we did end up looking into and found out that that was the case so we have stopped using that and we are on the lookout now for a new foreign language program so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know in the comments below and then we have piano listed on here my younger two boys do piano three times a week my oldest does it every day and then I just have the category of other down here for them to write in different things that they have done that maybe weren't assigned to them if they do an art project or some kind of science experiments or maybe we got our Tinker crate in and they're building the robot or whatever for that week they can plug all of those kind of things in or if we go on a field trip that kind of stuff that's where the other falls into place so that is kind of how the categories work and then over on the days of the week you can see here how I have some blocks shaded in I let the kids kind kind of choose what days a week they want to work on their particular lessons especially with my oldest but my younger kids still need a little bit more guidance and a little input on when is best to do things so I have the days of the week kind of color coded to split up the workload a little bit so that they don't have one day that's like super heavy on assignments and then other days that are really light I kind of tried to balance it out throughout the week just as a suggestion they are allowed to choose say if they wanted to do two or three math lessons in one day they can mark all of those off on the same day and then they don't have math they only have maybe one or two more in the math lessons they need to do for the rest of the week I'm totally fine with that I really am big on letting our kids have some of that autonomy and being able to learn how to organize and coordinate their schedules so I want to allow them that freedom to be able to choose when they want to do some of their lessons but again I do have those was color-coded on here just as a suggestion for them if they really don't know what to do they can look at this and see what I have suggested for them to do for the day normally when it's time for them to do school they get their binders out and then they can quickly and easily look at their checklist and look down the column for the day of the week that it is and then see those colored blocks so they can quickly and easily see what lessons they should be working on for that day another bonus of this is that I can quickly and easily look at them myself to see kind of where they stand for the week if there are things that they need to be focusing on I can make sure that they get in and get those things done I did a video of a day in the life of our homeschool if you're curious kind of how like that normal day goes I will link that in the description below if you want to check out kind of how these work in real life these checklists are for all of the kids independent work we used to do some of these subjects family style within our morning time but this year I I felt like that was just taking up uh too much of our day um doing that group style where then I was having a hard time keeping up on helping kids out with their math or their spelling reading all of those things so I decided to do the more Charlotte Mason approach this year and have each of our kids be reading a lot of their own lessons instead of us reading them together uh we still do morning time but it's more read aloud we do our scriptural memory we're working through um biographies or books of like missionaries or other Heroes of the faith that kind of thing we will do that together as morning time this checklist covers their individual work it does not include some of the group work that we might do like geography we do once a week together if we do an art project together those kind of things are things that we would then put on those other categories that we do family style but this checklist is basically created for them to know what to do on their own in their independent time the downloads that I have on my website I made them a little bit more geared toward more of a traditional homeschooling model I have just the main subjects and then there's categories for you to add in other subjects as well these downloads are editable so you can add in here the number of times per week that you want to do each of these subjects you do not have to do five days a week I included five rows for each of these subjects so you can write in there if there's a specific lesson that you want to be done math I just left with the number of lessons per week because most people just kind of do the next math lesson you could do the same for language arts if you have an open and go curriculum then you just want to cover a certain number of lessons per week and then you can also edit and type in there under the other category if there's something that you want to type in ahead of time or your child or you can just go in and write if there's other things that they have done that you didn't plan ahead and then I broke it down and just did a totally blank checklist each one of these lines is editable so you can go in there and customize it however you need to do for your family both the checklist that I have for you come in blue green and purple so then after their checklist I have another tab here and this has their book log this is where they are keeping track of all of the books that they're reading I just made these up so there's only one on here so far because we just started using this about a week or two ago but I have on here the start date the title author number of pages and then they'll put the date that they finished and then there's five white stars for them to fill in their rating of one to five for how much they enjoyed the particular book I have downloads available of our book log I will leave that in the description below the download has three different color options there's green blue and purple your kids can choose which color they like best if they want to use this and then next after the book Vlog we have their language arts packet so I just have these little tabs these are little Post-it tabs um where they can then quickly and easily flip to the assignment that they're working on in their language arts so that's easy for them to find when it's time for them to do language arts this binder system works really great to help us know exactly what needs to be done on a normal daily basis but it is really helpful to have kind of a routine for your homeschool day and if you don't have one already established for you make sure you check out this video here that is about how we time block our day to fit in all of our homeschool subjects thanks so much for watching I hope you enjoyed the video today if you did please hit that Thumbs Up Button below and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: The Eclectic Homeschooler

Views: 14,599

Keywords: the eclectic homeschooler, homeschool, homeschooling, homeschooling for beginners, homeschool planning, homeschool binder system, homeschool binders, homeschool lesson plans, homeschool lesson planning, creating independent learners, how our kids teach themselves, student planner, student lesson checklist, homeschool lesson checklist, weekly checklist for homeschool, checklist for homeschoolers, homeschool checklist, minimalist homeschooling, simple homeschool planning

Id: luaI0MVciTM

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023