I recently shared about the way I planned out our new homeschool year and included some FREE printables to go along with it… they have made life a little neater around here! Now I will share about the Homeschool Notebooks. We did use a similar system many years ago but I couldn’t find the post where I had shared them before so I decided to make a new post with some updates and some new printables.
You do not need to print these out but you can use them as a template for putting together your own notebooks or you can print them out and use them in binders… whatever works for you. We have done both of these in the pastand I will try to post some pics of what our current notebooks look like once we get them put together.
There are so many ways to go about planning out a school year but this is the easiest way I have found for me to do this as we don’t use any one site or curriculum. I am usually gathering materials and ideas throughout the year so I try to jot them down or put them in a special place until I am ready to sit down and plan out what we would like to use.
This year I used the ‘Arts of a Balanced Home Education’ List from Brightly Beaming Resources as a guide for helping me to plan… it went along well with a lot of the Charlotte Mason ideas I have been trying to implement in our routines.
We had a great time watching the Solar Eclipse even though we didn’t experience totality. The kiddos did their Morning Circle Routine and then watched a couple of lessons about the eclipse. Then they had a quick lunch as they were so excited to get out and watch for the eclipse.
I’ll try to keep this short and sweet so you can have a chance to check out these great sites and products! I started a list of sites and resources for March as we came to them.
These are some of our favorite resources from this past month:
I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this before but this seems to be something that a lot of people are just now figuring out. We’ve been using this system for a while now… even before I started blogging!A lot of these pictures are from a previous house that we lived in but they show the way we started out with our color code adventure and some of the organization that we had. This post was actually started almost 2 years ago… I’ve been trying to go through some of the posts that have been overlooked and forgotten about.
When you have a pile of kids like we do then things can get really crazy, really fast. That’s what happened to me when we added 3 kids to my 4 all at one time… complete CHAOS. Thankfully, I had the older kiddos pretty set with their routines and they were such a GREAT HELP with the younger ones but then when we added 2 more kids to the pile it got CRAZY again but thanks to this little ‘HACK’ it didn’t stay crazy for too long.
What did we change?
We assigned a ‘color’ to each child and then I tried to color coordinate most of their items with this chosen color. To start with I gave each kiddo a cup in their color. They kept these cups at the kitchen sink for water and such and they used that one cup all day. I already had these cups** so that was the colors we originally picked from. When the cups were washed they were put back in the little bin so we no longer had a billion cups lying all over the house.