A New Twist on the Workbox System

We have been using Sue Patrick's Workbox System for two years now with good results. It is a way to organize daily school work that fosters motivation and independence in your students (click here for a description of how we used workboxes originally). In order to make it work most effectively, however, I have to spend time each evening re-ordering the work in the workboxes, at least those few items that do change from day to day. And in our case, we have one schedule Monday through Wednesday, a different schedule on Thursday and yet another schedule (lighter) on Fridays when we have co-op, so on Wednesday and Thursday nights I was having to take a bunch of work OUT of the workboxes completely and store it somewhere, so only the items left was the work to be done the next day.

I don't mind working hard for my kids, but there is a limit to my time and energy, and this became really cumbersome. So last week I enlisted the help of daughter G, who is very organizationally gifted. I asked her to help me think of a way to tweak the system and make it more flexible for us. I told her what my two goals were, 1) to make it easier on me to change the order of work, or the amount of work, and 2) to make it very clear to the boys what they were to do each day so that they could do it independently without asking me what came next.

Daughter G thought about it for all of 3 seconds and suggested that I write the subjects on the little velcro squares rather than numbers. Brilliant! I made new little squares of cardstock in each boy's color, wrote subjects on them, and put little pieces of velcro on the back. These went on the cardstock squares we were already using for "done" work and became, essentially, our new assignment charts. Here is son L's assignment chart for one day this week (click on photo to enlarge):



(By the way, "activity table" is a table in the back of our schoolroom that has history or science activities on it. The activities change week to week. Currently there are Ancient Rome activities on it.)

I also made a second cardstock square to move all the little subject squares to as they were finished. This is the "done" chart. So now all I need to do to rearrange work is to move the little subject squares around, or take some off and put other ones on (for those things we only do once a week, etc). Super easy!


I put the two cards together on a ring so they are easy to hang or take anywhere. This picture shows son L's assignment chart in front and his "done" chart hanging behind, while son G's green "done" chart is hanging in front and his assignment chart is hanging behind.


So we did away with the plastic tubs and our workbox racks are now just a place to store our notebooks and workbooks in any order. This summer, when our schoolroom is, Lord willing, completed, the workbox racks will probably go away for good.


We have used this new system all this week so far, and we all LOVE it! The boys have finished their work in record time, and I have been able to spend a good portion of each morning working on reading with Little Man (more on that later) while the older ones progressed through their assignment charts independently. This is easy to manage, flexible for our needs, while still being effective as a motivational and independence-fostering tool. Thank you daughter G!