Practical Homeschooling
Any homeschooling family knows that the process of learning takes up most of your time. Getting things organized may the key to success for some families. We've compiled tips and ideas to make your homeschooling practical and a good fit into the rest of your life. As a bonus, we take a look at some of the ways you can save money while learning together as a family.
Organizing Tips
An organized home may seem impossible when you have kids around all day long, but it can be done. Here are tips and ideas that will help your household run smoothly.
Avoiding Burnout
Everyone faces it at one time or another. Read through these tips for inspiration and ideas to combat homeschooling burnout, both for parents and children.
Money Savers
It is a fact that homeschooling will cost you some money. But there are ways to keep costs down. In fact, you can homeschool quite inexpensively and how much you spend is really up to you. Browse through these resources, tips, and ideas to help you save some money.
Housekeeping
Doing the household chores can seem like a burden when you have so much else going on. There are some strategies to help make this burden lighter. Read through these ideas and tips on keeping your home clean and how to get the whole family involved.
In The Kitchen
What's for dinner? That is the age-old question every mother has faced, day after day. Browse through these menu planning ideas, recipes, and strategies for getting food on your table without all the hassle.
Chores
With children learning and playing (and, let's face it--making messes) all day long, chores become an inevitable hurdle for the homeschooling family. Here you'll find everything from printable chore charts to chore organizers, along with helpful ideas on how to get kids to do their chores and how to divvy them up to make it fair for all.
Lesson Planning
Don't know what to teach today or how to get everything done? Explore these resources for planning your lessons and get ideas on how to help your homeschool day run smoothly.
Record Keeping
Record keeping can be a great way for you to see how you and your children are progressing, as well as a means to meet state requirements for reporting and administration of your homeschool.
Calendars
You can use calendars to keep track of activites, plan your lessons, keep your records, and organize your life.
What's Popular
Time Management Tips for Homeschool Families
Time. It's a homeschool family's most precious resource--and the claims on a homeschooler's time are many and vociferous. Time management is a homeschool parent's most pressing challenge. Includes tips on using a planner and how to get the most out of scheduling.
Getting Organized Part 3
Staying organized is much easier if everything is in its proper place. Details the use of plastic bins to aid in organization of your home school.
Home Management Tips for Homeschool Families
Homeschool is school, but it's home, too--and housework will be with us always. How do you manage to keep up with household chores while homeschooling your children? Cynthia Townley Ewer, editor of OrganizedHome.com, explains how to lowering your standards, planning, and getting your children involved will help you reach your organizational goals. She suggests scheduling housework first, learning new time-saving methods, and getting needed support.
Tips for Homeschool Planning for Multiple Ages
For the most part, the more well ordered days are the more smoothly the day will go. Not only does it require planning on our part as homeschooling moms, it requires diligence and perseverance – daily.
Calendars Net
Free online web calendar hosting. Calendars Net is designed for webmasters who want to integrate interactive calendars with their websites. Use this online calendar to make organizing your support group functions a snap.
Conquering Kids Clutter
A guide to managing and conquering the clutter in kids' rooms.
Encouragement Forum at vegsource.com
If you are feeling burned out or need encouragement, this forum is for you. Share your struggles and get help, ideas, and support from those who have walked in your shoes.
The Organizing Sourcebook : Nine Strategies for Simplifying Your Life
The nine habits of highly organized people Organizing consultant Kathy Waddill demonstrates how the simple act of being organized can improve your quality of life. In The Organizing Sourcebook, she presents nine organizing principles that can easily be applied to any situation, activity, or environment. The book gives you the tools for managing time; decreasing stress; and dealing with cultural, personal, and emotional change. Case histories illustrate how each strategy solved a specific proble...
Organize-to-Homeschool
Homeschoolers face tremendous demands on their organizational skills. Frequently creative, hardworking, and goal oriented, they must manage the home, other children, teaching, and the many other demands of a stay-at-home parent. This board is designed to offer support, find solutions, and discuss troublesome situations. Although there are many aspects to homeschooling, the focus, the only focus, of this board is solving organizational problems related to home schooling. This group is a part of t...
Organizing Your Homeschool Day
If clutter and outside activities are taking over your life, you need a plan and some routine in your life. Get tips on how to plan and prioritize your work, and to respond appropriately with flexibility when life gets hectic.
Record-Keeping & Organizing: 10 Reasons to Keep Records
Record-keeping is an important part of your homeschool. Barbara Edtl Shelton lists the benefits of keeping good records, including the greater ease of evaluating progress, helping to set the direction for your homeschool, helping to preserve memories for the future, and more.
Getting Organized Part 1
This article includes great organization tricks and tips for getting organized, including organizing around themes, how less is more, how to plan in blocks of time, and a discussion of storage solutions.
Organizing Plain and Simple: A Ready Reference Guide With Hundreds Of Solutions to Your Everyday Clutter Challenges
Desk drowning in papers? No room for the car in the garage? Santa still sitting on the roof in May? A less-is-more philosophy is great, but we all still have way too much stuff. The home office swallows up whole rooms, as does the family computer station. Then there's the home gym, the TV room, and the playroom, not to mention our collections - books, CDs, toys. Time management experts agree that when the minor things that take up space in the mind are eliminated, there is room to think about th...
Home is Cool: Get Organized for Home School
Homeschool families, like Tolstoy’s happy ones, are all alike: drowning in a sea of clutter. Home schooling a child beats all other organizational challenges hands-down. How do you count the clutter? The books. The papers. The biology experiments on the kitchen window. The six-foot-tall child sprawled on the floor, reading. The record-keeping. College admissions and testing and letters from the correspondence school.
Homeschooling on a Budget
Most parents believe educating their children is an expensive proposition. According to The Homeschooling Book of Answers, public schools spend nearly $7,000 per pupil per year. What if you were told there were families providing an excellent education for their homeschooled child for $50 per year? And even for those who splurge on a few beautiful books occasionally, they can easily manage to keep their total expenses under $200 a year. Sound impossible? Here's how.
Resources
Unclutter Your Home: 7 Simple Steps, 700 Tips & Ideas (Simplicity Series)
Hundreds of practical ideas for sorting, evaluating, and getting rid of all those material items that get in the way of a simplified lifestyle.
Educational Travel on a Shoestring : Frugal Family Fun and Learning Away from Home
Educational Travel on a Shoestring shows parents how they can help their children learn–and have a blast–while traveling. From researching destinations to sharing activities that both teach and entertain, this priceless guide offers practical information for parents who want to have more fun with their kids, build closer family ties, and enjoy richer educational experiences–all without spending a fortune.
Help for the Harried Homeschooler : A Practical Guide to Balancing Your Child's Education with the Rest of Your Life
Homeschooling moms and dads can be overwhelmed by the demands on their time. Between their children’s educational needs; their roles as spouse, parent, and more; and their own individual desires and goals, these mothers and fathers struggle to accomplish all that must be done. In Help for the Harried Homeschooler, experienced homeschooler, author, and mother of four Christine Field offers sound advice for parents who want not only to achieve homeschooling success but also to reach a balance in their lives.
Home Schooling from Scratch : Simple Living, Super Learning
Parents learn what they really need, how to find or create materials and opportunities for less money, and how to organize their household for economical, happy learning.
The Organizing Sourcebook : Nine Strategies for Simplifying Your Life
The nine habits of highly organized people
Organizing consultant Kathy Waddill demonstrates how the simple act of being organized can improve your quality of life. In The Organizing Sourcebook, she presents nine organizing principles that can easily be applied to any situation, activity, or environment. The book gives you the tools for managing time; decreasing stress; and dealing with cultural, personal, and emotional change. Case histories illustrate how each strategy solved a specific problem.
The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook
If you are thinking about homeschooling, or are struggling with a educational homeschooling curriculum that is difficult to use, let Dr. Ray and Dorothy Moore show you how to make homeschooling an easy-to-live-with family adventure in learning. This low-stress, low-cost program shows you how to build a curriculum around your child's needs and interests - and around a realistic family schedule. Instead of a cut-and-dried approach, you'll discover the freedom of a flexible program that encourages creativity and initiative.
Conquering Chronic Disorganization
The real-life stories of chronically disorganized people and the ground breaking, easy-to-learn organizing methods used to end their chronic disorganization in the area of residential clutter, office organizing, paper management, storage, and time management. Conquerings pages includes an extensive index, user-friendly summaries, quick tips, helpful photographs, and a resource section of products and organizations.
Organizing Plain and Simple: A Ready Reference Guide With Hundreds Of Solutions to Your Everyday Clutter Challenges
Desk drowning in papers? No room for the car in the garage? Santa still sitting on the roof in May? A less-is-more philosophy is great, but we all still have way too much stuff. The home office swallows up whole rooms, as does the family computer station. Then there's the home gym, the TV room, and the playroom, not to mention our collections - books, CDs, toys. Time management experts agree that when the minor things that take up space in the mind are eliminated, there is room to think about the big things. The same goes for the home. The visual clarity that comes from de-cluttering rooms, finances, and time promotes mental clarity, peacefulness, and contemplation. When everything is organized, it is easier to enjoy the meaningful things in life.
Organizing Plain & Simple is like a course from an expert teacher, grounded in the fundamentals and enriched with philosophy, tips, anecdotes, illustrations - everything necessary to make home and life run more smoothly. Donna Smallin takes a personalized, nonjudgemental approach to explaining how to assess each individual's situation and suggesting where to start organizing - room by room - and then covers how to stay organized. Then she offers advice on organizing time and finances, as well as organizing for the seasons and for special events - the birth of a baby, combining households, a move, kids going off to college, successful downsizing. Smallin presents a broad range of innovative solutions in the running feature "One Challenge, Three Solutions" that includes tips for solving classic organizational issues from a wide range of professional organizers.
One Thing at a Time : 100 Simple Ways to Live Clutter-Free Every Day
Simple, effective ways to put things in their place
Those piles of papers, clothes, and other things you thought you'd successfully de-cluttered have returned, and this time they brought friends. What's the use of trying to fight the clutter? Is there a better way?
This powerful and useful guide delivers solutions that work, no matter how overwhelmed you feel. The answer isn't an elaborate new system, or a solemn vow to start tomorrow. Instead, psychotherapist and organizer Cindy Glovinsky shares 100 simple strategies for tackling the problem the way it grows--one thing at a time. Here's a sampling of the tips explained in the book:
*Declare a fix-it day
*Purge deep storage areas first
*Label it so you can read it
*Get a great letter opener
*Practice toy population planning
*Leave it neater than you found it
Written in short takes and with a supportive tone, this is an essential, refreshing book that helps turn a hopeless struggle into a manageable part of life, one thing at a time.
Those piles of papers, clothes, and other things you thought you'd successfully de-cluttered have returned, and this time they brought friends. What's the use of trying to fight the clutter? Is there a better way?
This powerful and useful guide delivers solutions that work, no matter how overwhelmed you feel. The answer isn't an elaborate new system, or a solemn vow to start tomorrow. Instead, psychotherapist and organizer Cindy Glovinsky shares 100 simple strategies for tackling the problem the way it grows--one thing at a time. Here's a sampling of the tips explained in the book:
*Declare a fix-it day
*Purge deep storage areas first
*Label it so you can read it
*Get a great letter opener
*Practice toy population planning
*Leave it neater than you found it
Written in short takes and with a supportive tone, this is an essential, refreshing book that helps turn a hopeless struggle into a manageable part of life, one thing at a time.
Homeschooling on a Shoestring : A Jam-packed Guide
So you want to homeschool but don't think you can afford it. This book is a compendium of ideas for the family that wants to start or continue homeschooling on a tight budget.
Includes ideas for making money as a stay-at-home mom, sources for inexpensive curriculum, affordable teaching tools, and ideas for low-cost field trips. Also discusses ways to run your household more efficiently and with less cost.
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Featured Resources
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Taking Charge of Your Child's Education: A Guide to Becoming the Primary Influence in Your Child's Life
Every parent wants to give their child the best start in life. The best way to do that is to get fully involved in their educational process as their primary influence. This book is full of helpful information, resources, and tools that will lead you...
Field Trips: Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird-watching, Shore Walking
With Jim Arnosky as your guide, an ordinary hike becomes an eye-opening experience. He'll help you spot a hawk soaring far overhead and note the details of a dragonfly up close. Study the black-and-white drawings -- based on his own field research --...
Pocketful of Pinecones: Nature Study With the Gentle Art of Learning : A Story for Mother Culture
Karen Andreola, renowned interpreter of the Charlotte Mason method of education, has written a unique sort of book in the homeschool world. Pocketful of Pinecones is a teacher s guide the nature study cleverly disguised as a heartwarming story writte...
Educational Travel on a Shoestring : Frugal Family Fun and Learning Away from Home
Educational Travel on a Shoestring shows parents how they can help their children learn–and have a blast–while traveling. From researching destinations to sharing activities that both teach and entertain, this priceless guide offers pract...
For the Learners' Sake: Brain-Based Instruction for the 21st Century
This proposal for a platform of education reform needed to prepare students for a 21st-century workplace and society draws on information and ideas from two current areas in neuroscience: brain research (physiology and applications to learning) and s...