Organizing All Those Great Ideas

Now that I'm blogging again and getting around to other people's blogs more, my good ideas list has been building up lately including papers that I've printed out, files in my email box and bookmarks on my browser.  In the past I've had two different hard copy storage options.

2 digital and 2 hard copy storage spots is not a recipe for efficiency and this week I hit my limit on the disorganization.  I consolidated everything into one binder with labeled tabs.  I printed out all the emails with ideas I was thinking we would use.  I pulled out some loose lists that had gotten stuck inside books, grabbed the sheets stuck on my inbox shelf, and got rid of other redundant files.

I know a lot of people are now using Pinterest as their digital idea file.  For me it's a great visual reference but I've never figured out how to get it store all my booklists or digital web rings.  Also, when I actually sit down to do someone else's activity with the kids, I need the directions printed out.  If I have to print it out anyway, I'd just as soon not wade through all my digital files.  I'm not a Luddite, but I'm definitely one of those people who has better retention from reading something on a piece of paper than on a screen.

If you have a great idea, or a tutorial for digital organization, or a good old fashioned hard copy method please share it.  I need all the help I can get!

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Organizing A Week's Lessons

Last summer a fellow homeschool parent shared this link  from Dana Rayburn about an organization tip for students with ADHD.  My toads and I don't have ADHD but this is a great idea to help anyone stay organized.  We used it to manage our daily studies for about 4 months and then we fell off the wagon.

It fell down for us in a couple of ways:

• It was time consuming for me to prepare the week's folders.  I'd do the post-its and slip in worksheets for each day.  It made for a bit of double prepping because I already had a master spreadsheet of goals for the month.  We live in Florida and the state requires we keep track of what we do so I'd have then record everything in binders which meant 3 levels of handling the same information.  Sometimes we didn't do everything and I'd have to refile the extras.

• Toad learned to cherry pick.  He caught on in about two days that I was stacking activities the fun activities to later in the day and we had the daily debate about why we couldn't start with the fun stuff.

 

• It was Kindergarten for Toad and learning the calendar is pretty important.  He had the days of the week down no problem but it wasn't helping him track the month as a whole or visualize the difference between the 10th and 24th of the month.

• ... and I had guilt about recycling stacks of post-its.  I started getting vague on them, like writing reading, rather than names of books, so I could reuse them but then we had to have the conversation about which book and "Why can't I read that one instead?".

So it seemed like a great technique but not the one for us.

This year we're trying a blank student assignment journal I got cheap from Rainbow Resources.  I printed mini labels from the office supply store with our subjects.  When he's done with a subject he puts the sticker in the right row and column and I add in the specifics, i.e. name of the book.  It's taking less time than the other method and not difficult.  The down side however, is the book came blank.  It doesn't have any pre-printed dates or even spots to write it in.  He's too literal for writing in margins so I'm doing that but again we're missing the larger calendar reinforcing.  It also doesn't allow us to track regularly scheduled items well, like sports practice the same time every week.

So I'm thinking of tweaking it yet again. 

Homeschool Creations shared a calendar math printable recently.  I'm thinking about incorporating more official 'classroom' type calendar activities into our day but still use the sheets to track what we actually did in the day so it keeps my workload down.

I know many of you have good homeschool organization ideas.  Feel free to comment your ideas or links to things you've found helpful.  I'm clearly on the search for the "perfect" way to keep us organized.

Art Cart into Science Cart

This little cart used to be our art cart. I did a post here about where all the art supplies went.  I worked some magic on it and now it's our science cart.


I really like that it consolidates all our strewn out science equipment. The microscopes have not been getting enough use and I'm hoping having them more in view will inspire us.  I inherited the dissection scope and the compound scope has gotten more use up to now, but we have plans.  It's a bit of a work in progress and as our year in science progresses I'm sure we'll do some rearranging.

Organizing everything also helped us spot some shortfalls. We added a compass, a flexible measuring tape, a set of dual metric and imperial measuring cups, a bug box, and a bug field guide. We got the bug field guide from the Xerces Society.  They have some good fact sheets on their website about bees if anyone's working on a project on that.


Our favorites from the resources basket:


The boys love the guides that fold since they're light and they can carry them in their backpacks.

If you've got a favorite science tool that you use all the time and it looks like we're missing it, please add it to the comments box since I'm looking for suggestions.

Transforming an Art Cart to an Art Cupboard

We do a lot of art but we live in a small house - 4 people in 1,000 square feet.  Also, since I teach part time I have art supplies for 12-15 kids not just two.  My kids had an art cart for most of their supplies and all the other materials were stashed in 3 different spots.  Some of that was self designed as I didn't want a toddler to have unlimited access to paint.   Not only was it annoying to traipse around rounding up all the different supplies needed for painting, it wasn't kept as organized as I would have hoped for.  There were smaller organizing units inside the baskets, like a bin for crayons, one for colored pencils etc., but since all those were kept in bigger baskets when it came time to clean up everything just got tossed in the top of the basket.

Now the toddler is a preschooler and we were all tired of how it was laid out.  I got Mariah Bruehl's Playful Learning book as well, and her lovely pictures of pretty, inviting art spaces helped too.

So we got a cabinet from a local used furniture store, moved our bookshelf to our bedroom, and reorganized.  The toads were very excited about the process and helped quite a bit.  The former art cart has been converted to a science space which I'll do another post about.

The top basket in the original arrangement was for library books but older toad couldn't see in it so even that necessitated help on my part for him to read independently.  That got moved to their bedroom on top of a new small bookshelf because we got to get rid of the changing table (still need diapers at night but don't need the table for that YEAH).  Lastly, I did some purging of our bookshelf and that's much neater and organized.  So, self congratulatory pat on the back for all the organizing, and now I just have to make time for all the new ideas bouncing around from creating such nice work spaces!

I heartily recommend Playful Learning as well.  It's got wonderful sensory based learning activities for all the subjects.  Here is the author's website.