Daily binder

Today I took it easy on my arm again. It’s feeling somewhat better but not all the way so I didn’t want to push it.  The kids worked at trying to restore some sanity to our messy school room. I tore it apart Monday sorting thru all my 15 years worth of curriculum, and then add in the normal wear and tear to the room and it equaled a disaster.

While the kids worked on cleaning and organizing I spent most of my day working on my binders. I have a Home Management binder that I love, but I realized I really didn’t need to be hauling it out daily when there were only a few sections that would be used every day.

I decided to fine tune it and create a smaller binder for daily use, something that had everything in it I needed on a daily basis. I broke it up into sections:

Calendar: monthly calendars for the entire year printed out

My daily planner sheets: this is a sheet I made to have my day at a glance and mark things off as I go

Our daily routines section: Every day has an assigned duty such as Monday being our “kitchen” day. I’ve listed the things that need to be done on Mondays such as specific cleaning in the kitchen or extra meals made, salad dressings made, granola, or snacks for the week.

A daily chore section: This has a detailed chore list so the kids and I can look at what chores each child has. We have our house broken up into “zones”, such as kitchen, living room, etc. Each child bids on a zone and that’s the part of the house they are responsible for maintaining. We keep a copy of each zone and the duties that go with the zone printed up and hanging somewhere in that room but we also have copies of each zone list and what needs to be done in that zone in this section of the binder.

Weekly, monthly, and semi annually chore lists: This is just chore lists for things we only do weekly, monthly, or even less often than that. We do detailed cleaning of each zone in our home on the weekends. We only focus on one zone a week. I really don’t think we need to deep clean the bathroom every week. That may sound gross but when it’s swept and wiped down daily that makes it easier to maintain and doesn’t usually require the heavy duty cleaning every week.

Table time: This section keeps track of the things we do together at the table for school. We’ve really been slacking in this area over the last few months of fundraising and preparing for Shelbie’s trip. I’m anxious to get back into the swing of things!

Lesson plans: Instead of having my lesson plan book sitting around where it always gets misplaced, I cut off the binding, 3 hole punched it and popped it right into a binder that I knew we would being using daily. The less I have to keep up with the better!

Reading logs: I make my kids individual reading logs for school every year. Usually they go into our big school binder that holds all of our tests results from the school or other info that we don’t need daily or sometimes even monthly. I decided that having a section for this eliminates me having to pull down that heavy binder every time someone completes' a book and they don’t have to look it up on the computer either. It’s right at my finger tips!

I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak and fine tune this over the rest of the summer. Hopefully by the time we start school it’s working the way I hope it will!

“ He who gains time gains everything.”