How to Organize Your Homeschool Curriculum

hey friends welcome back to my channel kailyn here and this is full purpose and heart um today i want to share with you guys how i am organizing the school year for the next coming school year we will have my third grader um first grader and then my preschooler and i just want to share with you guys how i organize it i've been getting a lot of questions especially over on my instagram account um about how to get started with homeschooling and i'm gonna answer a lot of those questions in a future video kind of as a q a back-to-back thing but i really wanted to dive into how you can organize your school year to try and make it look more approachable less intimidating for those of you who are new to the homeschooling world i have been homeschooling for a few years now and these systems i'm going to show you are the ones that have kind of held through tried and true for the last couple of years i'm going to show you two different systems in this video so hopefully you can get kind of a good flavor and maybe you know mix them up or do something so that it works well for your family so if you're interested in this kind of content then let's go ahead and get started all right so let's go ahead and get started i want to share with you guys a couple of steps that you can take to organize your school year um so step number one is going to be to check what your district requirements are just depending on whatever state you live in the state is going to have some requirements and then those requirements are going to be passed down to the district that you live in that the school district that you live in for my particular state we have a form that we have to fill out with our district to get some attendance exemptions so make sure you click on the link below i'll make sure and put one there for every state and then you can find out what your state's requirements are um the second step now this is kind of tricky when i very first started homeschooling all those years ago um the second step that i took was to look up the district's learning path or their curriculum guide i come from a public school background i was a public school teacher so i was very familiar with kind of this pacing guide and what it was that the district wanted the students to learn not having any idea what to teach my kids i turned to the district for some guidance on that i wouldn't recommend doing that now looking hindsight i feel like what whatever curriculum it is that you choose that publisher is gonna have done all that work for you and make sure to give you a really good foundation for each of those subject areas so um decide on what subjects you're going to focus on and i'll address some of these things in other videos too but as a quick overview the three r's reading writing and math or arithmetic reading writing arithmetic um are kind of your major ones that you want to make sure and practice every single day then there's elective courses which would be your science and your history and then there's additional kind of electives that you can choose to do or choose not to do and that would be things like art maybe a language class typing any kind of service or outside of the home learning that you want to get done co-ops and that kind of stuff so kind of lay out what it is that you want to have your school year look like and what subjects you want to cover so that would be step number two step number three is to organize your calendar and what day are you going to start school and what day are you going to end school for lots of people myself included when you're new to homeschooling it's natural to follow the school district's calendar but just remember that you are not required to do that you can have you can start earlier you can start later if your state has a requirement of how many days you need to have attendance um then just take that into account but i'll give you an example for us our homeschool year starts in the middle of july and it ends at the beginning of may we have four day school weeks so we go to school monday through thursday and then we typically go about five to six weeks on and then we take a week off break so you may be thinking well how can you cover the material that you need in that amount of time and i'll go over that here in just a couple of minutes so those are like your first three major steps to getting started with homeschooling is you decide what does my state require what subjects do i want to cover and on what days are we going to have school once you've done all that your next step is going to be to pick your curriculum and what it is that you want to do so how i do it is i just get a piece of binder paper and i write those subjects down that i had written that i had decided earlier with a couple of spaces in between and then i go to work researching and being that you are already here on youtube researching how to organize your school year um then you have a great starting point youtube is a fantastic resource there are a ton of mamas out there who have recorded videos about curriculum in every subject that you can think of in all of the grade levels so uh start looking there and you can just do a youtube search i have a ton on my channel as well for the subject the grade level and a bunch of stuff will pop up and then on your binder paper just start writing those publishers and maybe like a note or two of something that you liked or more that you want to look into i also leave a space where you can write down the price as you go looking into each of those this is my piece of paper that i'm like writing on here um so that's your next step is just to start going through each of those curriculums and decide kind of what you're drawn to and it may seem really intimidating at first but let me just encourage you that it is a more easy perhaps than you may think that it is because you're gonna be drawn to curriculums based on your teaching style kind of what grooves with you and how you know your children like to learn or to act even if your kids are coming home for the first time as a homeschooling family or if you're doing some temporary homeschooling you're going to be able to understand what your kids will will gravitate toward so um so that's where you start and there's a lot of different publishers out there and there's boxed curriculum sets where the publisher has done all the work for you and just gives it to you in like a open and go format or you can do it more of an eclectic style which is what i do where you kind of pull different curriculums from different publishers and find what works for you okay so those are all of the steps that you need to do before and i will do other videos in the future and do like a back to home school week or something like that um just to kind of give you more information on that if you're interested in that then you can check those videos out so that pulls you to actually preparing for your entire school year and once you've decided on what curriculum you want and it starts arriving at you at your door that's always very exciting time for me here on my side of the mountain um then you're gonna have a whole bunch of books and curriculum these are some science books for example um that i'm using this year and you begin to decide on what days you're going to do which activities now things like math i'm looking in my folders here i'll show you this binder here in just a second or my crate rather um but things like math i'm trying to pull this out and it's not going very well okay so things like math these are some math lessons from our curriculum they're gonna just be labeled like lesson one lesson two lesson three um this is labeled 127 because we're finishing up our kindergarten year before we start first grade with my daughter um and you just just rip those out one lesson per page and you organize the year and you can just rip them out and be like well we're having five day school weeks or four day school weeks and you rip them out and then you're going to put them in a crate like this okay so i've shown this crate before on a lot of my videos and i've kind of done it mostly the same but i've improved it slightly this year so i'm excited to show you that um but as you go through your year you're just going to pull those pages out and put them in the given week this is going to eliminate all of the thinking that has to do when you reset each week um another way that you could do it is to keep all of your things in their books and do kind of like a work box system like this one back here let me grab one for you so this is uh these are just some whoops these are some um i think they're like cosmetic drawers probably but anyway we just use them for whatever for homeschool obviously um and what you do is then you can actually put the book inside here and at the end of each day your when your student is finished doing their school work then they turn it in you can have a basket or some kind of like gathering spot for finished work and then at the end of the school day before you start the new school day as the teacher you just go through their boxes and put their new assignment on top so here's an example is this obviously says scripture but just go with it for the example this is the book that my daughter is going to be using for her science curriculum so i would put the whole book in there like this and then close that up and then as each day comes i would take the book out go to the next assignment that we're doing rip this page out like so okay now it's out and i would actually just put it right on top of her book here and then put it inside the drawer so then you're gonna take this drawer stick it back into the thing and each of your drawers are gonna be finished for the school year now you can get two of these crates then you'll have six subjects one for each day and then i often put like the scripture on the top um it worked out that i could put it right here you can read but in years past when i've had seven subjects i usually just put like our scriptures on the top and then the kids can go down for the rest of the crate okay so that is kind of two different ways that you can organize your entire school year and then you don't ever have to worry about what lesson comes next whether you rip out the entire book and put it in a crate like the one that i have over here like this oh this is heavy um or if you do kind of a work box system and you rip it out one page at a time either way you're not having to like reinvent the wheel every morning be like okay what is it that we're gonna learn homeschooling is nothing like my teaching life in teaching high school i had to generate the lesson plan every single day and try to figure out what it was we were going to do doing homeschooling has been a lot less lesson planning and there's so many curriculums available that you're not building out an entire unit like you do in public school i have a lot of friends that are now pulling their kids out of school and doing kind of a temporary homeschool life and they too were public school teachers in their former lives before they were moms and raising kids um and so that's something that i hear myself saying a lot is this is not going to be you building curriculum and trying to figure out what am i going to teach my kid the curriculum does a lot of work for you and your job is to organize it so that each morning when you sit down with your kids they have what work they need and you know how to facilitate that learning so let me turn my camera around really quick and i'll show you my crate and then how i transfer my crate into a binder for um weekly work on that one okay let's let's go ahead and do that all right my friends here is my tried and true crate it does look a little bit different than this year than it has in years past so this year we went with the manila envelopes um and these hanging folders are my color i love color i'm kind of a color queen and so um i love to have color this is in the wrong spot so i gotta fix it okay um so what i did is i've got three kids in school this year and so i just divided that every left sided tab was going to be my oldest every center tab was my middle child and every right center tab was going to be my youngest student and then one of my subscribers out here actually printed these for me because i couldn't find the right um things that i wanted but she found them for me and she printed them for me so each of my kids have a color so my oldest camera in here is green and then next to that i put week one so by doing this it's eliminated the need for having like these label tabs sticking up i just think this looks so much more uniform it's so much cleaner as opposed to what i did last year and videos in the past that you may have watched um so each of my kids have their weeks and then what i've done is let's do week two here is i've gone through just like in years past this is kind of the same setup um and i have ripped out all of the assignment or the work pages that my student will be doing so he has his history in here he has some science in here he has his math in here we have what else um oh and his reading comprehension pages in here so all of the work that he needs is going to be here in one folder and i just went one subject at a time and then ripped it out and then put it into each coordinating week so that he had four days worth of work for each of those okay same thing for my daughter here now her curriculum is a lot more eclectic um so i just printed off those pages that she's going to be doing she's got horizons math this is a page that comes from an evan moore so she's doing this for her science work and then we also have some language arts that she's doing with her language arts program i'm doing the good and the beautiful and i knew that lessons for week two was going to be covering b and d confusion so i printed off that form that's something that i had made um a little while ago and then for my youngest he's doing preschool with my little preschool with me program so i just printed off all the pages that we're doing in that class like for my little online thing and i just put them in here so that he already has them kind of ready to go and we're doing ice cream during week two so um anyway then those are all ready for him and then i did that kind of going all the way down now you'll notice in this one here um for my daughter she has like a folder now this folder is something that she's gonna be using for several weeks when we get down here to week eight you'll notice there's another one and these ones i actually print off and i create this is her history or yeah her science excuse me social studies unit um and i've done a review on this in another video so i'll link it here up above this is called the little thinkers unit and she includes all of these pages so i just printed off these pages and then comb bound them with this like color thing on the front and she's going to then have this in her drawer so that every day when we do social studies then i'll just be like okay pull out your work pages and we'll do a page for that so that way i'm not worrying about having to find it where is it whatever it's right here and then i did that again we do it in week eight and then week 14 is the next one and here's one in week 21 so i just keep those in there and then when we start it we pull it out and i put it with her other stuff in one of her drawers or with her binder um these books that i have up here i am just saving them because we're going to do these as morning work i'm going to have like brain starters or whatever and we did these we're gonna do these draw right now things um anyway so that's this system right here okay so keeping everything in a crate you can actually use that crate and then transfer it week to week into drawers like this if that's something that you want to do um i have found that the binder system here is a really easy weekly system we've been doing this for a long time i have several videos about this on my um channel as well but essentially what i do is i just transfer all of my students work into their folder behind dividers so we'll have five dividers one for each day of the week and then those um assignments that he needs to do that day are in his binder so when we when we sit down to do table work then he can just grab his binder and all of the work that he needs to do for monday is there i have had people ask me do you ever divide by subject and the answer is yes i did used to do that where behind each tab instead of having like one page per math one page for history yadda yadda um i had all of the math pages in one tab and all of the history pages in another tab i have done that before and it did work well but i have found for my student that he didn't feel progression in his schoolwork when i did that he kind of just felt like there was still a lot of work to do after monday was over because he had only done one assignment behind each of those tabs so in subsequent years i have divided it up it's a little bit more work on my part in the front end but not anything to like complain about so all i really need to do is just divide it up by each day that way when he finishes his work on monday he feels that progression of completing his work and that's really been a successful thing for him he just feels better about that so um you can do it either way if you choose to do a binder and just put all of their work behind the tabs i don't have any tabs in here but um then just keep in mind that anything that you can do to kind of help your child feel like they're moving along in their week is helpful for them too i'm just feeling like the end is inside kind of a feeling so anyway hopefully that was kind of a good introduction or beginning start to how you can get your school year started i have several pages and things that i can show you and again i'll do another like week long video series where it's like back to home school and i'll just show you how i organize and how i plan and how i build out units and all that kind of good stuff so look for those videos when they come out here in the future and again i'll also film that q a video here coming up with some of those questions that i had from my instagram account so full purpose and heart on instagram that's more of just like a fun place this is where you come for all of your homeschool information and then on instagram it's just kind of a fun place for me to share random things that come to my mind so anyway follow me over there if you want to subscribe to my channel and give me a thumbs up bye [Music]

Channel: Full Purpose And Heart

Views: 4,934

Keywords: homeschool, preschool, curriculum, full purpose and heart, teaching

Id: b3-PKNsBdkg

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020