I found this site this week GuruLib .  I've been busy playing with it.  Which has also prompted me to do some purging and organizing. LOL  It is an online library where you can catalog all your books, software, movies, games, and computer files.  I've been busy entering all my stuff.  So far I've got 1295 things in my library and I still have a long way to go.  I have barely touched my computer files and I still have a few bookcases to go through. 

This library also has a cool feature where you can search your library with a search word.  Some things that they can match with stuff online will have keywords and descriptions.  The stuff you have to add manually, you'll have to add your own.  I've been playing with this feature and it is so cool how I can type in say Egypt and everything I own on it pops up.  I can see where this is going to save me some time and money.  Oh and the best part it is FREE!  There is also no limit on how many you can enter.  Yeah!  Oh and you can access it anywhere you have internet access as long as you remember your username and password.

I'm sure as homeschooling parents you can relate to the abundance of stuff that seems to go along with homeschooling.  It is always a challenge to find a way to organize all this stuff.  Therefore I thought I'd share how we do it.  I'd also love to hear how you do it.  We have transferred our dining room into a learning room.  So I have a whole area set aside for this but let me add the dining room is kinda of a small room and has 6 doorways into it and one window.  Which kind of limits my options on how we set it up.

This picture shows the kids bins.  This is where all the work they are working on right now is located.  The bottom shelf holds all elective books and resources.  The second shelve holds our main history books.

Here you'll see our numerous totes.  I have them labeled as to what subject they are for or what's in them.  The larger ones are for Math, Language Arts, and Science.  The smaller ones are broken down for what is in them.  The expandable file thing you see holds my forms I use often and lessons I'm working on.

In this photo the one set of 3 drawers holds all the different kinds of papers we use.  It has construction paper, notebook paper, card stock, and copy paper.  The other set holds household things we use for crafts and projects.  It has things like toliet paper tubes, paper roll tubes, shoe boxes, egg cartons, and other things.  One drawer holds completed projects.  The box on the shelf holds things for portfolios.  The little drawers hold paper clips, hole punch, post-it notes, thumb tacks, and various things like that.

Here we have our rolling drawers.  It contains all the things that get used a lot, like pencils, pens, markers, crayons, scissors, glue, and other things like that.  And yep, that's the corner of my desk there seems to always be some stack there.

Here is book shelves 2 and 3 they hold a different subject on each shelf.  One shelf has just reference books.  The notebooks on top are mine and the kids for subjects like history, science, and Bible. 

This picture shows our bookcase that is up at top of the stairs.  It holds all our living history books and just general reading books for kids.  There is also various science and Bible story books on there.

And just so you know my book cases only look so nice because I organized them a couple of weeks ago. 

My homeschool library was getting out of control and it was taking too long to find the books I wanted.  So I decided it was time to organize this mess. 

This is what I did:

1. I pulled every book off the shelves and seperated them by subjects

2. Made a list of each book and put it in a word document

3. I got some colored sticker labels and each subject was assigned a color

4. Then each book in a certain color was assigned a number I recorded this information in my word doc. also.

5. I then printed the list off and put it in my teacher notebook

Now when I make up my lesson plans for the week I just put the color and book number in the lesson.  This has been so beneficial, I'm asking myself why I didn't do this years ago.  Now I also have an easy reference list of my books that I already own before I buy anymore.  This way I know what I already have so I don't buy duplicates.  I can also see what I still need to get.

Sometimes I could just kick myself for not thinking of things earlier.  Especially when I realized I bought a copy of a book I already own.  I found 2 books that I had copies of when I did this.  Will live and learn.