School prep

I am having so much fun getting ready for our upcoming school year.  I have been working at things a little bit here and there, but my goal is to be completely done by the end of next month.

I am doing a few things different this year.   One of those things is to have all the kiddos each have their own binder that will hold all their work in one place. 

For Poppet and Shadd I have dividers set up for each day of the week.  I load their school work in it on Sunday night and they know exactly what they have to do for each day and the order in which to do  it.

To make life even a bit more easy for me I have also gone thru each of their workbooks and pulled work for about 3 months and stapled them together in a weeks worth of work and put them in a folder.  Now instead of pulling out each book and pulling the work I just go to the child’s folder and pull the work for the week and put it in each day’s folder. 

 (Folders filled with 3 months of schoolwork)

(A day’s worth of work stapled together)

I also have them do some extra things that are just for fun and to break up the momentum of the school day such as coloring pages, games, and puzzles.  I printed off pictures of certain learning games and  put the picture in their binder under the day I want them to do it.  For the puzzles I just printed up a page that says “puzzle time” and they know to go get a puzzle to work on.

(Poppet’s binder)

(I even scanned the Draw write Now book cover and laminated it on a piece of cardstock and put that in her binder when I want her to do this)

(picture of a game that I put in Poppet’s binder)

For Shaylah, Shayden, and Shannen I am doing it a bit different.  Their binders are divided by subject instead of day.  Since they don’t have as many workbooks as the little ones I am printing up a schedule of when I want work done by and they keep that under the tab of that subject.  For a subject that they do have a workbook for, such as Wordly Wise, I will pull a months work of work and hole punch it and put it in their binder. 

(the older kids binder)

We have been putting our workbooks in practice for two weeks now and the kids love it!  They love seeing exactly what they have for that day and how much is left.  School has been so easy for me too!  I am still fine tuning this system a bit, but so far we are all very pleased.  The old saying “if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” is very true!  So far we are all happy!!