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.
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.
I posted about the bedroom makeovers in another post but thought I’d share a few more details about what we did just in case anyone else wanted to do something similar.
As many of you already know, we bought this house and it has already been well-loved. It was definitely in need of some TLC… a bit more than we had realized at the time but we’ve been making improvements as time and budget have allowed.
We had a lot of hopes and dreams for this house when we first moved in but there were so many issues that happened and had to be dealt with that we just had to focus on those. Plus the pandemic had just started, we were dealing with an unexpected high-risk pregnancy and then a stressful premature birth with a NICU stay and other complications, and then when we thought things were getting better we were sidelined by an unexpected leukemia diagnosis.
This year has been busy already and I’ve been on a mission to get a little more organized… I really NEED the organization and simplified routines that we had before. I spent a little time and revamped my planning sheets for our Home Binder so I thought I’d share them with you.
You’ll find sheets to keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, upcoming holidays and events, garden planning schedules, family meeting checklists, goal planning sheets, habit trackers, seasonal to-do lists, daily/weekly/monthly planning sheets to keep you on track, blog planning sheets, and meal planning sheets plus a pretty cover! You can check out these older posts for some ideas of upcoming holidays to celebrate.
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