Organizing Your Home for Homeschooling with Lots of Littles

 

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about organizing our lives for homeschooling, so now let’s talk about organizing your home for homeschooling with lots of littles. Having a set routine and knowing what do expect can help you feel at ease when the time comes to organize things like curriculum, supplies, and other clutter like toys.

There are lots of different ways to organize your curriculum and most often this will be based on how you want to run your homeschool. This year, we’ve switched things up since we have our oldest starting first grade. With three younger siblings and the work starting to pick-up a bit, I wanted to have a more clear plan of what we wanted to learn and in what time line so we can try and get it all done.

We are doing a 32 week school year. I’ve already {generally} mapped out our plan of attack including natural or annual breaks that occur for us. Since we will have a pre-K3 and a pre-K4 this year, I based our schedule around a weekly alphabet focus with holiday units thrown in there. Don’t forget, it’s okay to put a little focus on organizing cute and fun. It will make you more incline to enjoy the school year.

• Set a start and end date
• Filled in holidays, outings, week-long breaks
• Start filling in blanks
• Tear out, photocopy, or whatever you need to do to your curriculum to be prepared
• Fill work for each child in weekly folders {we set up 32 weeks for each child}

Our family is big on nothing is anyone’s and everything is everyone’s. By that I mean, we share everything. Carrying that over into school, art, craft supplies, we have have to organized supplies to everyone can find things they need. We have always kept the majority of our supplies in “Big Betsy” {an up-cycled dresser that had bullet holes in it. lol}, and then a few in sorted buckets {thank you dollar spot!}. You have to ask permission to get items out of Big Betsy, but the sorted bucket items remain out on a shelf next to coloring books and blank paper for free-for-all everyday use.

This year, to try and encourage more responsibility and eliminate the “I didn’t get that out!” fight, I have set up workboxes. Each child has their own workbox. Similar to the Workbox System {which we are likely to fully implement when they’re older}, each child will have his or her basic supplies for school in their box and nightly I will add worksheets, flashcards, learning games, etc to the individual boxes based on what they will be working on that day.

Don’t forget that PLAY is a vital part of learning for littles. “Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.” – O. Fred Donaldson Having their things organized will help you keep your sanity, have your house hospitable, and keep your kids from having sensory overload.

We not only organize toys into “Centers” to allow for less chaos when searching for or cleaning up toys but we also rotate items to keep toys fresh and exciting. Another benefit to this method is small spaces can be used more efficiently. We use an office-like room off of our dining/kitchen for our play/school room. Basic rule: everything must fit in here or something needs to go. We also invested in some shelving for our garage to store tools but mainly rotated toys.

I hope this helps newbies like me feel they are better equipped to start this crazy thing that IS homeschooling. I challenge you to use these idea and manipulate them to work for your family. Remember, there’s nothing new under the sun but learning is a never ending process so trying and retrying is how we as parents continue to learn things.