Another year of boxes, bins, notebooks: trying not to duplicate

Three years ago I posted about Plastic Bins and Binders--the usual back-to-homeschool question of how you organize your own information on scheduling and assignments, how you impart that to your students, where they find their work to do (both what to do and the books or supplies to do it with), and what they do with it when it's done. Do your kids have to come to you to ask what to do next? Do you give them a list, a planner, a binder? Do you have copies of what they should be doing when? This time of year I always seem to come up against the same problem: trying to avoid overkill or over-repetition in making that information available to the people who need it.

I'll put it another way: Say you're doing the Ambleside Online curriculum with a couple of upper-elementary students. You buy a big binder and mark it "school." You print out the years' booklists and schedules for the AO Years that you will be doing, and some sheets from the AO website about composer studies, Shakespeare and so on. You find the kids' math workbooks or textbooks and figure out how many lessons a week you need to do. You cross out the couple of books you couldn't get and scribble in print very neatly your substitutions. You put a few dividers in the binder and you should be ready to go. No?

Well, it's Sunday night (or Monday morning) and you're looking at the week's work on the 36-week AO schedule, since that's the easiest to follow without having to rewrite the whole thing. You want to figure out which days you'll be doing which readings, plus you have to figure out some copywork, plus (since you have two or three students) you need to know who's doing what when. So you go to work with a piece of paper and pencil, or on the computer (assuming you don't have all this on one of those tracking programs), and there you go, another piece of paper. Now what are you going to do with that?--stick it up on the wall somewhere, slip it in a folder, give copies to all the kids?--but they don't all need to know exactly what each other's math assignments are, so maybe you have to write each one an individual schedule for the week. Now what are they going to do with those?--stick them up on the wall somewhere, slip them in a folder...

And then there are all the good craft ideas you pull out of Family Fun magazine, books you write down to look for at the library, the list of stuff you need to get together for science--those sorts of extra pages that you would find in a printable homeschool planner. Oh, wait--you do have an e-planner sitting on your hard drive, so you print out the my-reading-list pages, and then you see those schedule pages all with their nice boxes...and before you know it, you've got a whole second system of pages going, but your kids are still waiting to find out what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to let you know when they've done it.

Put it this way--that binder's going to be bulging by the end of the year, and you're going to be heaving it around and fighting with the pages when all you wanted were the words for the morning hymn. (Or do you have a separate binder for those?) A planning binder does not always combine well with a what-do-we-do-next-today binder such as the Deputy Headmistress has described, if only for reasons of weight.

And those are just YOUR papers, not the students'.

On a simpler level, assuming again that you're doing an AO year--do you print out a copy of the year's suggested extra reading for each student? What do you expect him/her to do with it? Do they have official "everything-school" notebooks or planners themselves, or just individual notebooks for different subjects? Is the list going to get crumpled in the bottom of a milk crate? Is it going to be laminated and marked off with a dry-erase marker? Or do you just put a pile of books somewhere and say "those are your extra reading books, read them when you get around to it?"

This is what I've settled on this year:

I have a blue medium-sized binder marked "Department of Education." (Mr. Fixit found that in the unwanted-binders box at the office, and I thought it was appropriate.) This holds the year's overviews for Crayons and Ponytails, a school year calendar, subject checklists (such as a list of chapter titles in a history book), some blank planner forms in case I feel very creative, two e-book printouts behind their own dividers, and space for NEXT year's plans as they get worked on through the year. That's it, that's what's going in that binder. I also have a black hard-backed notebook (from a yard sale) that is kind of a dumping place for ideas--like notes on crafts to make.

I have a Scholastic teacher's box (from a yard sale) with fancy marked subject folders. I keep thinking about getting rid of it, and I've also thought about giving it to Crayons to organize some of her own work, but at the minute I think I'm going to keep it around to throw miscellaneous subject ideas into, the things I don't want to be bothered copying into the black notebook and that I don't want taking up space in the binder.

We have some cheap black foldable crates; I'm planning on giving one to each girl to hold notebooks and pencils. We've never done the milk-crate route before, so we'll see how it goes (and how the crates hold up).

I have a pink canvas basket that is currently holding all our CD-Roms, but that is going to get cleaned out and used for Mom's In-Box on my desk.

Crayons has a Bible League school planner (remember I got one for each girl to use for Bible readings?) and I am going to write her assignments in there--not all ahead of time for the year, just for the week or so ahead. I have a dollar-store pad of weekly organizer paper (decorated with sea creatures) that can do the same thing for Ponytails.

I have a small desktop file holder that holds the rest of my life--church and so on. I have a big fat (hernia-worthy) binder of recipes that I'm not quite ready to trim down.

Oh, and the most lovely thing--I have six four-packs of beautiful floral file folders that I found a couple of weeks ago at a yard sale. I think we're going to use some of them to organize our Gracious Arts tea-time-homemaking-young-women stuff.

That's about as organized as I want to be this year. Just nobody give me a Teacher's Book...because I might have to start filling in all those boxes...