Homeschooling: Organization is KEY

I am by nature an extremely organized person. This can be good and bad. It’s good when I have assignments or goals. It’s bad when I’m working with less organized people, lol. Lots of sparks fly from time to time.

Honestly, I don’t know how “unorganized” people homeschool. I’d go to bed every night in terror, hoping that my work done by the “seat of my pants” worked. I’m too high-strung for such dangerous living! Plus I have this terrible propensity of throwing away papers. I really don’t know how it happens, but for some reason, I’m always throwing away papers we really need to keep, like insurance documents, receipts, etc…. sigh. So I have a few boxes where I toss EVERYTHING in now, according to subject.

OK, so anyway, I have a very, very, VERY organized desk. I actually have two of them (one for school and one for my writing jobs). This is the desk where we establish our homeschooling “base.” To prevent clutter (and me losing paperwork), I keep the desk stripped bare, save for the current lessons and current books on which we are working. Other books and notebooks (like textbooks, score keys, etc) are stored on a bookshelf. When a child finishes a book, I put the expired lessons on the bookshelf and take out the new ones, and put it in its proper shelf on my desk.

This is a wild looking desk, I know. The base is a very old teacher’s desk we acquired from an old school building. It’s HUGE and it weighs a ton. It takes two men or three of us girls to move the thing. The top is a plywood box that my husband made. I drew up the plans of what I thought I needed, and he constructed it. It is the best organizer I’ve ever had.

I’ll be posting more about our curriculum and actual routine, but right now I just wanted to give curious onlookers an idea of how things look. You can see slots in the desk. These things hold the kids’ notebooks (they do not write in workbooks, they write their answers in spiral notebooks- this saves money), their charts (we keep track of exactly when they work and what they work on), journals (we have food/physical activity journals and music journals), and their Bible verses notebooks (more on that in a second). In these slots, I also store printed-out answer keys, extra printer paper, and extra notebooks.

I also have Goofy- my mascot- on the shelf. Everything has a particular place so that if it goes missing or undone, I know about it immediately. The kids fill in their own journals- for example, they must practice a musical instrument or work in music theory at least 30 minutes a day, four days a week. So in their music journal, they write down exactly what they have worked on, and for how long. I’ll be blogging about the books we use for such purposes in future posts. I think we’ve now got this thing all down to a science, lol.

About Bible verses. My pastor came up with a brilliant idea: he has the children write ten verses from the New Testament four times a week, in their best handwriting. Then, the children must read these verses aloud to a parent. It is AMAZING at how well-educated my kids have become from this. They have large portions of the Bible memorized and understand the doctrines. This requirement also fulfills: handwriting skills, oral-reading skills, spelling, grammar, and literate sentence structure. And because it is a discipline and because it is the Word of God, it is helping the children with their character and reasoning skills, too. My kids are all excellent spellers, readers, writers, and they all have scholarly skills in the understanding of the scriptures. I highly recommend this for any homeschooling parent.

Now about textbooks. We use the Abeka books, but have supplemented their education with a wide variety of books, DVDs, computer software, and field trips. Homeschooling is, essentially, our life right now. We have a structure upon which we homeschool- a philosophy of education, if you will. It is heavily based on reading and on history. Everything springs out of that, really. We do not read fiction books anymore. I think my youngest, who is now 11, read his last fiction book last summer. Why am I against fiction books? Well, why read fiction when there are so many interesting and edifying non-fiction books to read? The problem is that public schools and libraries are filled to the ceiling with mind-melting drivel that does nothing to educate the young.

Now before you think I am some kind of dictator— I am!!! Muahahahahahah! OK, ahem, well… my kids HAVE read fiction. Actually, for the first five years of schooling, I allowed fiction books. I’ve usually stuck to the classics (Black Beauty, Flat Stanley, Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, which are non-fiction books but read as fiction). And if my kids want to read a fiction book today, they may after it is approved. But they really don’t want to anymore. Why read about weird stuff like sorcery or talking mice, when the adventures of Daniel Boone (written by the man himself) and the exploits of missionaries (like John Wesley and Hudson Taylor and Elisabeth Elliot) are so much more compelling (not to mention character-building)? Garbage in, garbage out, I say. To us, homeschooling isn’t a means to an end, it is the journey of life itself. I am being homeschooled as I homeschool. It’s a way of life.

More later…