May. 28, 2009

What To Do With All Those Books

Are you a book person?  My husband and I are!  I suspect that many homeschooling families have at least one person who is.   And when book people homeschool, storage becomes a problem.  A big one! Now I know some homeschooling families rely on the library for most of the books they use, we also make very good use of our library!  But I like to have our core books in the house with no due dates or request lists.  I know others sell their books online as soon as the year is over.  I just can't seem to do that!  I would much rather donate the books we no longer need to a family that could use them.  Of course with one child in 9th grade, one in 7th grade and my youngest in 2nd grade, that means I need to store some books for a number of years. So what to do?  Well I started keeping the books I wanted to save in a file cabinet, then a book shelf which rapidly became 3 and that was before the end of our second year of homeschooling!  We are now finishing our 6th year and I have come with a much better system.  I use a clear plastic blanket box for each subject (I started out with just 2 boxes, but it is now 1 per subject) that I store in our attic crawl space.  The clear boxes are more expensive than the plastic totes, but they are much easier to know what is in them especially if I can't remember if I called a particular book English or History.  If you use Homeschool Tracker you can keep a list of your books and where they are located, right in the program.  That way you won't end up with 3 copies of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (don't ask ) and you will know where to find the copy you have. Now that you have an idea for dealing with school books you are finished with, what do you do with the books you are still using?  As soon as all the books have arrived for the next school year I sort them into piles, 1 for each of the boys and 1 for common books.  The piles for the boys will be put into their "School Crate" and the common books are placed on the book shelf.  The "crate" did in fact begin as plastic milk crates, but last year we have purchased a 15 gallon tote for each boy to put their books and general school supplies in.  The milk crates worked well, but looked messy with loose papers everywhere.  So we decided to try totes since they have lids, MUCH BETTER!!  We like to use the individual crates since we occasionally school on the road, my husband's job requires that he sometimes travel and we like to go with him.  Now all we have to do is pack the crates and we are ready to go!  I also have a small file box that I put all of my things in.  We prefer the Rubbermaid brand because the plastic is more flexible and don't break as easily. The biggest difficulty is this time of the year, when we are still using THIS year's books, but I also have NEXT year's books here.  My system is to just leave the books in their shipping boxes, put them in my family room and work around them until the year is over.  Not the best solution.  Any ideas?

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