Organization for Home Schooling

I'm very often amazed at how having a large family, a household to run, and children to educate have forced my scatterbrained, artistic thinking sort of self into being an organized thinker and organized do-er. It gives me a little smile.

Kendra's seasoned advice is to prepare the whole year's studies before you begin. A somewhat daunting task for the part of me that wants to unschool as much as possible. Since we don't know what the year holds in store for us as far as fostering and court dates and visitation, the wisdom behind having something solid at hand to loosely lead our way won me over.

I spent a few nights ordering resources, tagging free online ones, and looking through the books we already own. It was beginning to feel like Christmas. I love books.

Then I sent my family away. Well, almost all of them. Little guy is still attached. Sean took the older four up to the cabin for a sleepover. Surrounded by fun new books, a scanner, printer and laminator, I was in nerdom bliss.

This is the result:

Not the cheesy cover art, but the notebook itself. If our house is on fire, this would be right up there on the list of things to grab.



In years previous I have bought a separate daily planner to use for keeping track of the kids work for the school district. This year I had the delayed genius idea to look for free planner pages online. Of course they have them, which saved me $10.

Each day has lessons for the three oldest kids. Annaliese is in fourth grade, Andrew is in second and Aiden is in kindergarten. Miss smarty pants Ella basically does what Aiden does just because she wants to. If I tell her to play, she bawls.

Behind each daily planner page are all the printed resources needed for the week, cursive copywork, coloring pages, memory verses, etc.



The feeling of not having to scramble on Sunday nights to put together lessons is a lovely one.