Top 5 Suggestions for Best Organizing Your Homeschool Materials

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People enjoy being organized. It makes us feel prepared. We are ready to meet any new obstacles more easily when we know where the things we need are located.

Sometimes being organized helps alleviate the stresses of the day. We have planners we carry with us, calendar apps on our cell phones, or meal plans hanging in the kitchen.

How do you organize your life? Do you find yourself more organized in one area than another? Perhaps you have a cleaning schedule but are perplexed as to what to do with all those wonderful worksheets and lessons you prepared for your children. Or maybe you need to figure out how to organize your files so you can find what you need on your computer for next years' curriculum.

Everyone has tips and tricks to organize their materials. Here are the top five things that work in our household.

Top 5 Suggestions for Best Organizing your Homeschool Materials 

Accordion File Holder 

I put our son's homeschool papers in file folders based upon different subjects, lessons, or days of the week and organize them to meet our needs. For example, I am currently organizing his material by subject as we work on spelling, social studies, and art. In the past, I have organized them by days. (I still keep folders hanging near our calendar that are organized by days of the week for his sister to complete while we are 'schooling'.) 

Three-ring Binders

I LOVE binders. I do not think I could stress that fact enough. When I was a teacher, I had a binder for each unit (or chapter) we were studying in the different history classes I taught at the high school.  Within each binder I organized them further by sections, quizzes, reviews, and tests. I  kept a clean copy for photocopying and an answer key. (I also organized my files on my laptop in a similar fashion.)

I have a section set aside for each month with appropriate worksheets, stickers, and other materials for my young children.

Bookshelf 

Our son's workbooks, coloring books, binders, and current reading material is located here along with games. We can also store shoe boxes for toys that he and his sister can play with together to work on building friendship, sharing, etc. 

Bins 

Canvas storage bins are a great place to store individual boxes, bags, etc of items that are needed daily for Homeschooling. And you can rotate them based on days of the week (if you want to have 5 bins) or just put everything into one or two. 

Laptop 

I like to have all my PDF files organized by suggested grade, subject, or activity-theme. I find it so much easier to find what I am looking for when I can go to one or two folders and do a quick search. I also try to rename files so that I can more easily search for them. So instead of just Easter Puzzles, the name might be Easter Puzzles Math Questions to Answer 1st Gr. 

What are some of the ways you and your family organize? Do you have any tips or suggestions to help make life work more smoothly? 

I also linked up with Timberdoodle's Home Organization Blog Hop! 

R is for Random (Blogging through the Alphabet)

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I used to take pride in the fact that I would know exactly where my books, VHS tapes, or DVDs were located on my bookshelves. I kept the majority of my shelves categorized by historical subject. All of my Shakespeare plays, both print and visual, were together just above my shelf of Tudor books, documentaries, and some knick-knacks from a trip to England. Unfortunately, since marrying and moving, my system started to become a bit more haphazard. Now I would say there are more random items on my shelves than I would like.

For example, among my Russian history books one can also find pens, our BB-8 Bluetooth speaker, a remote control for a K-9 (Doctor Who) toy, and a Celtic skull.  I have also discovered that hockey pucks given to my 4 year-old are acting as book stops for my $1.00-$2.00 Dover Books collection. There is a Christmas tree craft, Mother’s Day cards, and two sonic screwdrivers on another shelf. So random! Minecraft has also started invading my Middle Ages/French Revolution book shelf as an ocelot toy that has lost its tail too many times has moved in next to a souvenir brought back from Paris by either my grandfather or uncle.  

And don’t even ask where my American Colonial and Civil War books have gotten to since that bookshelf needed to be removed, as it was falling apart.  (They are in random bags and boxes throughout the house. I can’t wait to purchase a new bookshelf.)

I know there is a time and place to embrace randomness – like Random Acts of Kindness Day. Or when you order a mixed box of donuts and don’t really care what random iced choices that the clerk picks for you. But when it comes to books about one of my passions – random does not work. (Okay, it doesn’t work in a lot of cases for me. I took my 100+ pack of random polyhedral dice from Wiz Dice and organized them by color as soon as I could.)

Now that I have a family, I am trying to come to terms with the randomness that life throws at me. But there will soon be a major spring cleaning of my bookshelves to remove a bit of the random aspect from them.

Some Random items that may be found on my bookshelves: 

This week I joined up with the following blog(s):