Weekly Homeschool Organization | Crate Organization

As many of you know, I am a homeschooling mom of three.  Currently, my oldest is in Kindergarten.  My middle son is three and a half and my youngest is two and a half.  We definitely do some early preschool activities together.  And of course we are constantly discussing things like shapes and colors and numbers and letters, especially through play.  I only truly have to keep track of one of my children’s actual written and workbook lessons and assignments at the moment since they are all so young, and I’ve found that the easiest system to do that is using a weekly crate storage system.  

I’m using a hanging file folder for each day of the week, plus a hanging file for completed work, one for extra math materials, and another for extra reading and phonics materials.

Within each day of the week file, I’ve got a manila folder labeled for each subject we cover daily: Reading/Phonics, Math, Science, and Social Studies.  Science and Social Studies are definitely not covered daily, however we typically read lots of books related to those topics.  When they’re young, I tend to think that covering those topics through real life experiments, books, and discussion is so much ore effective.  Since I’m using Horizons for Phonics and Saxon for Math, those subjects typically have workbook materials each day.  Having the folders for those subjects is a necessity for sure.

Typically on Fridays {sometimes on a weekend day} I pull out the workbook pages needed for the following week’s lessons.  I also take this time to print other pages out, gather materials for lessons and projects, and spend time filling out my lesson plan book.  This is also when I take all papers from our completed work file and three-hole punch them to add to each child’s documentation binder {I’ll share more on the documentation binders in a future post}.

Behind all of the hanging file folders, I keep my teacher manuals and my Kindergartener’s notebooks for Writing, Science, Math, and Social Studies.  I also keep my Plum Paper Teacher Planner in the crate as well.  If you’ve never tried Plum Paper Planners, I cannot speak highly enough about the company.  The paper quality is amazing and their options for the teacher’s 8.5 x 11″ planner are perfect for homeschoolers.  I was able to customize subject headers to be pre-printed on each weekly layout.  I’m already contemplating how I’m going to customize it for next school year once my littles start preschool and pre-k with me. 

When all three of my littles are “in school”, my plan is to have a crate per kid.   I love them for a few reasons, but my number one reason is that everything is contained in ONE SPOT.  We do school at our kitchen table.  Lots of stuff happens in this area of our home, so having the ability to put our school things away quickly is a MUST!  I can easily put it all away in our storage closet, out of sight, eliminating clutter. 

Within my kindergartener’s crate, I keep so many materials besides the assignment files and teacher manuals.  I’ve also got white boards that we use almost daily during math and phonics, sight word flash cards {these are THE BEST} and lists, crayons {that he doesn’t have to share with his little brother and sister}, Batman phonics readers, his daily devotional, Q & A a Day for Kids {LOVE LOVE LOVE this book}, a pencil box with pencils and dry erase markers, and math facts flash cards {on a giant metal ring hooked onto the crate}.

It all fits.  It all gets used daily.  
Win-win!

The beauty of keeping a crate organization system is that I can add to it or take things out of it as needed.  It almost never stays the same for entire month as I’m constantly tweaking what we use all the time.  Right now, it’s certainly what is working for our family.  In the future that may change, but in this stage of our homeschooling life, I like it!