Homeschool Organization (part 8)

Much has been written about organization in general, and homeschool organization in particular. I do not claim to be an expert in this area, but I will share the two organizational principles that have helped me tremendously.

1. A place for everything and everything in its place. This is an oft repeated adage, but it's really true! If you can make a designated "home" for every item in your house, and teach everyone where an item's home is, it is so much easier to pick up and keep your house looking neat. I confess that I do not have this one "down" yet, but I'm working on it. In fact, I think it's going to be a life long project for me, because just when I finish cleaning and organizing the last room in the house, the first one needs to be done again! Purging, discarding, and making homes for everything that remains is a great guiding principle for me though, and it works everywhere, not just in the schoolroom.

2. Store or keep items as close as possible to where you are going to be using them. This simple tip has also helped me tremendously and saved a lot of time over the years.

Each family's housing situation, space limitations, and storage options are different, so you will have to pray and think (sometimes outside the box!) and figure out what works best for you. For us, this is what our school organization looks like:

We do school primarily in our kitchen and family room. I have sometimes longed for a dedicated schoolroom, and may someday turn our small finished basement into a schoolroom, but since we use the basement as our toyroom right now and will need to continue this for at least a few more years, it just works better to have school in our kitchen. We also have a dining room where we eat all our meals, so the kitchen table does not have to be cleared off repeatedly throughout the day. For this I am very thankful.

My hubby made me a school cubbie unit a few years ago, with 6 cubbies in it. This is our primary piece of school furniture. The 4 older children each painted their cubbie in their own color (we have a color coding system in our family which we have used for years and everyone knows very well!) and I got two of them for my teacher materials (painted plum for mum!). I will eventually have to give one of these up to our youngest, but for now it's extra storage for me! Extra books, binders, and a small file box sit on top of the cubbie unit. To the right of the cubbie unit, way down on the floor you will see part of a laundry basket. This is the home for all our library books. We have so many books in our house, it's just imperative that we keep our library and home books separate (ask me how I know). To the left of the cubbie unit, out of the picture, is the rest of my kitchen. You know, the part we use for cooking. ;-)

In each cubbie unit lives what we call a "book holder" ~ it is a cardboard magazine holder that we use for daily workbooks to stand up in. They also each have their own binder with several divided sections in it for history, literature, writing and mapwork, though our oldest is the only one who uses hers daily.

Directly opposite the school cubbie is our craft cupboard, which is a small set of kitchen cupboards (upper and lower) that we have purposed for arts and crafts. It was too messy today for me to take a picture of it!


Here is a close up of the file box that lives on top of our cubbie unit. I have plain file folders labeled 1-36. These are for each week of our school year. Anything pertaining to a given week goes in these folders. They are largely used for our Tapestry work, but other items go in them too, such as history related coloring pages for the younger ones to color while I read, or lab sheets for a science experiment. I have colored folders in the back, in each of my children's assigned colors, that hold finished or in progress work for each of the children.

Above the cubbie unit hangs our white board.

It is fastened to the ceiling with large keychain clips, so that in the summer time I can unclip the white board in order to more fully use the window, and all that shows are the small eye screws.

We have very little wall space in this area, because one whole side is open to our family room and the other walls have either windows or kitchen cabinets on them. My entire available wall space is this on one side of the table....

.....and this on the other.

(as a quick little side explanation, this skinny wall is the one that gets posters changed most frequently, depending on what we are studying. The cursive alphabet lives here all the time because our oldest still refers to it sometimes when writing, and our next child will be learning cursive during this upcoming year, but the other things that are on it right now are a listing of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a copy of the Declaration itself.)

So to create more wall space where there was none, I decided to hang other posters from a very short "wall" that goes across the opening to our family room. I put sticky backed velcro strips on the wall and the corresponding strips to the backs of various posters, and then I can put them up whenever we want to refer to them.....

.....and take them down when we are done. I betcha can't even see the white velcro strips!

We have lots of word lists that go up and down on these strips ~ a homemade poster of adverbs, a homemade poster of homophones, etc. I love creating a language rich environment for our children! The best way we do this, of course, is through reading quality literature to them, but I believe it's also helpful to visually SEE lots of different words and how much they are a part of our daily life. We add to these posters frequently, and I give nickels to children who can think up new words to add. This is also where we hang large maps.

~

Just a couple steps from our kitchen table is this bookcase in our family room. I love this bookcase! It's an "expedit" from IKEA and it has lots of squares rather than long shelves. This has helped our kids to better organize the books we use most often. We have a square for science related books, one for history related books (not specific to our current studies), one for preschool books, one for a set of abridged classics, etc. The kids have done amazingly well at putting books back where they belong (that "everything has a home" thing again!).

Two of the squares are reserved for our current Tapestry of Grace books, and this next picture shows them with their lovely yellow DOTS on the spines! There is a good natured banter back and forth on our TOG yahoo group about the virtues of dotting all your books with colored dots to know what year plan they belong to (or not dotting as the case may be) as well as the virtues of putting pages protectors on all your TOG papers (hundreds and hundreds!!). My fellow tapestry users may be interested to know that I do dot but I do not page protect. :-) Yellow is the color for year 2, so if our children want to read a year 2 book next year, they will know to put it back with the other yellow dots. I have also written on each dot the week that it's used in our tapestry studies. Love my dots!!

Also within steps of our kitchen table is my preschool cupboard, which I featured in part 5 of this series. We do have quite a few school related things in bookcases in our basement, but all of the books, workbooks, and manipulatives that we use most often are right at our fingertips. It's not a perfect system, but it works for us!