Homeschool Organization for 5 kids!

Welcome back to The Scattered Schoolhouse. Today we are talking about homeschool organization. I have five children that are doing school with us this year in some capacity. Not full-blown school, but some kind of school with us this year. So I needed to come up with a system that would work to organize everybody's stuff within the space that we have. There are lots of different ways to organize things for kids when it comes to curriculum. I'll show you guys when I do our homeschool room tour more where everything goes exactly, but in this video I'm just going to show you what each individual child has and how we organize their actual curriculum stuff, if that makes any sense. There are a lot of people who utilize things like work boxes. We have done that in the past with the Ikea drawers when we just really had the girls doing homeschool. Each had a desk from Ikea and legs on one side and the other side was the drawers and we would put their subjects in the drawers so they would just open the drawers and pull out the sheets. But that was when we did a lot more like worksheet-based stuff where it was just like, sort of pull a page out of the book, stick it in their drawer and go. And we're doing a little less of that this year, a lot less of that this year, so that method wouldn't work anyways and we don't have the desk space. Because I have kids of varying ages and varying maturity levels, I cannot just have a shelf on our bookshelf that's like everybody's curriculum is there and I can just trust that you are going to go in there and pull out your stuff and nobody else's or that you're not going to mess with it when you're not supposed to. Do you know what I'm saying? So this I have found to be, so far, a really good system for us. Without any further ado, I present to you Latch Mate. I am not, this is not sponsored by Latch Mate, although I wish it was because I really love their stuff. Alright, so what we have here is a Latch Mate box for each of my children. On the outside of the box, I just have these chalk stickers and a chalk marker I used to write their names on them so that when they are in the closet back there, and I'll show you more of that in a future video, the kids, they just all stack on top of each other and the kids can easily see their names and grab their box. So at the beginning of the school morning, everybody goes and grabs their box. It's easy peasy. They bring it over, they sit down and inside their boxes is all of their individual subjects and individual curriculum and as I'm looking at this, I'm noticing that some of her books are missing so I'm going to have to go look on the shelf because she obviously doesn't have them all in there. Let's just take a little peek inside. Now we are not fully utilizing these top compartments yet. At the beginning of the year, they each had a pencil with a pencil grip and some other things in here. We're like two weeks into school and they've already just moved their pencils all to our caddy in there and they don't keep them in here anymore. So I'm sure as the year goes on, I'll find better uses for this. Like Rosie has flashcards and stuff in hers, the girls keep some paint and the bigger girls keep some paint and stuff in theirs, but Mr. No Man doesn't really have anything in his right now. Then inside, like I said, is where all their individual stuff is. So this is his Bible journaling notebook and then he has his level K primer book, his handwriting book, and then you guys know we've been using the Good and the Beautiful Math K. However, and I can go into this in a future video, it's proving to be a little too easy for him, which I suspected because he is technically in first grade and math wasn't as much of a struggle as reading. So we're kind of going through this skipping lessons and stuff. So I am also using Matthew C's Alpha for him as well. So we're kind of doing both and alternating, but that's not what this video is about. My point is that all this stuff lives in here. Then he has his composition or decomposition notebook in here. So he is able to just go get his bin and pull it out and it has everything that he needs for all of his individual subjects. Okay, so then the kids each have notebooks like this that we use a lot for group subjects and some other things. They all got to sort of pick their color and we are trying to kind of go to a color coding system for things, but Kennedy loves this like Robin's egg blue, Noah wanted black, Shelby wanted pink, Jonah wanted green, and Rosie wanted purple. So those are all of their notebooks. And it's just the start of the year, so that's why these are not super full. So Kennedy inside hers has, we're doing, we're using that draw the world book and our geography. So inside here is her world map folded up. Then she has her pencil pouch and her dry erase marker. She also has just a little dry erase board right here that I picked up at Target in the dollar spot. So they use that sometimes when they just need to write something quickly for me, you know, for doing something in language arts or whatever, and they just need to write quickly. The week is over, so it's not in here, but usually she also has index cards with her spelling words. So then I just have some notebook paper. And then here we have tabs for our human body unit, history, and writing. So she keeps hole punched in here, just different stuff from our human body unit that we are working on, skeletal system. And then in history, you print off the student explorer. So the whole student explorers in here and we've just started this. And so that's how we keep all the kids group subjects. Again, Noah's is very similar. He has his world map, his marker set, his schedule. And then same thing. He's got human body. This is his about me where he drew himself and he gave himself glasses because that was when he found out he was going to get glasses. And Shelby's, the pink one, is the same. And then for me, the way that I have been, and I might talk a little bit more and maybe even make an entirely separate video about how I'm keeping track of the kids, what the kids are doing. But I have been using my Hobonichi planner. Again, I got this idea from Project Happy Home and her YouTube channel and I really love it. So I will leave that link down below because she has some awesome ideas too. And I like her ideas feel very doable, like the way that she does things feels very doable. So that's what I've been doing. On our daily pages, I just sort of have a box here for each of the kids and I just write down what they've done that day because every day looks a little bit different. And some days life happens and things don't get done as we had hoped and stuff. So we all have our sort of routine of what we'd like to get done every day. And so far we've been pretty successful at getting most of that done. But on the off chance that it doesn't get done, it doesn't throw everything off basically. I'm just keeping track of what's actually getting done. So like for example, the girls have been doing two math lessons a day. They've been wanting to, they really enjoy it. So they are doing two math lessons a day. So then it doesn't throw off if I were to have like a pre-planned week of like, you know, they were going to do teaching textbooks lesson six on Monday and seven on Tuesday, but really they're doing six and seven, eight and nine, 10 and 11. It doesn't throw any of that off. So I'm just keeping track of work as it's getting done versus planning it out. And then if you remember in how I plan my year-round homeschool, I have a page in the very back of the book where I list out the different subjects, the lessons, and then we cross them off again. Most of these ideas came from Project Happy Home. So that allows me to just sort of keep an eye on where we're at versus being so strict with like, you know, this lesson gets done this day, this lesson gets done that day. It's more just like in the course of a month, did we get as much schoolwork done in that month as we needed to? And in some cases we'll get far beyond, like I said, the girls have been doing two math lessons a day. So that's how I track what actually gets done every day. They come to me, they show me that they complete things and I write it down in here so that I know what's getting done every day by each child. And that really works well, especially too for Rosie and Jonah because they are doing more preschool level stuff. So every day looks different, right? Some days they don't want to do what I have like in my head that they should be doing today. They want to do something else. So instead of, you know, me saying, oh, well they, you know, can't check the box that says they did lesson four in their preschool curriculum, but I can just go in there and write that like, okay, we did phonics. We played this game. We did that puzzle. Like I can write down everything that they did that was like school related that day. So these boxes just live in our homeschool closets. The kids can go in, open up the closet, grab their boxes, grab their notebooks, and we are good to go. And then we have a big bin in there that holds all of our crayons, markers, everything. So they just pull that out, pop it in the middle of the table, take everything out, and then it can all be put away, which is really nice and really helpful. Yeah. And especially like if we needed to even do homeschool on the go, it would be harder with group subjects, although I have my group subjects over there, so I could just throw those into my backpack and then they could grab their boxes and take them in the car if we needed to, you know? So it works for us so far. It's really working well for us and the kids seem to really enjoy it and be capable of doing it and doing it well. A big, big bonus is everybody can get out their boxes, everybody can put their boxes away, and I'm not having to clean up after everybody all the time. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. Just a little peek into how I keep things organized with five kids doing homeschool. Let me know if you have any questions. You can leave those down below in the comments. You can always check the description box for links for anything I mentioned in this video that you might be interested in looking and finding for yourself. But yeah, that's everything for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you all have a great weekend and I will see you guys again next week. Bye.