Recently we reviewed a fantastic product called "Sue Patrick's Workbox System" for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, LLC. You can find it at her website, www.workboxsystem.com. This is an awesome product that helps you organize your school day while placing more responsibility on your children to complete their assignments and activities. Please go to the site and check it out, buy the book, and consider using this, it is really awesome!! Since I am actually writing this blog about changes we made to the idea, you need to have a good rundown of the system as it is designed to better understand the changes we made, so please check out her site FIRST.
Part of the concept is about having boxes for the various assignments on a shoe rack, each filled with a particular activity. All activities are "listed" on a handy little strip with velcro to hold handy little numbers to direct your child to the numbered boxes and complete their assignments. This motivates children beautifully because of their desire to clean up the shelf, it is highly rewarding to watch the boxes be cleared out, and the more full boxes be set aside as completed when containing larger items.
The problem we ran into is that one of the things that bothers my son, who functions on the autism spectrum, is disorganization or any mess in his workspace. So we had to make some creative adjustments to the system in order to make it work for him. Add to that, the system uses numbered cards to mark the various boxes for work, along with a strip to place corresponding cards on to guide the student through their day. This is reminiscient of PECS (picture exchange communication system) for us and so we decided to run with that idea because it works very well for our son. SOO, rather than shoe boxes, we converted to a plastic seven drawer system from Walmart for $20. We chose the one with the four small drawers and three larger ones so that we could fit more games and things in the bottom ones and workbooks, reading books, etc. in the top ones. I still use the system base idea, having ALL of the items necessary for each assignment in each drawer, which at times means having pencils in every drawer, scissors or glue in several, etc.
Because we already had PECS for many games and things, we have placed a Picture of a particular game on the strip as an assignment, numbers are used for the drawers, and since the instruction strip provides up to sixteen assignments/activities for a day, we can still be completing that many activities while only using the neat seven drawers for some of them. And some things on the strip may be "lunch" or play in the yard, etc. His assignment strip includes game pictures (he knows to find them at the kitchen table where we complete activity center work), pictures of various work locations for our homeschool (I took pics or pulled them off of Google images of our write on wipe off board, pocket chart, computer programs, even the wii fit jogging program to fulfill Sue Patrick's running on days when the weather is bad.). These pictures are what we place on his instruction strip and he knows where to go, along with the numbered strips for a particular drawer in his stand. This kept things neat, gave me space to place bulkier items because most things do fit into the larger drawers when necessary, allowed us plenty of activities to still list on his assignment strip, and has fulfilled his need for neatness in the process. It also gave me the ability to roll his cart out of the way when not in use, even to another room when we have company, which is awesome!
And his responsibility level? Wow, it has improved greatly!!! I wholeheartedly recommend this book and the system. And I would definitely purchase the support materials because it will make your job so much easier when you first get started. We mounted the matching velcro to the drawers for both the numbers and the "Work with Mom" PECS and have also expanded our PECS offering to everything I could possibly categorize in our home school. I actually found a pocket chart for 100s made up of 100 two inch squares that hold the PECS perfectly and is awesome for me when planning because I just look over the items we have for school and pick what he needs to work on, then I record it on Sue Patrick's scheduling sheets to track what we have been doing. Awesome system!! Seriously. And you don't have to do what we did and make a bunch of PECS for all of your items for school, but we had many PECS already and they just slid right into this system beautifully. And of course, he loves the little pictures of his many activities!
I will try to get pictures on here soon of exactly what we had done. But I encourage you to try this product, if the boxes hold you back, give it some thought. This is the best thing we have ever done for our home school and for the independence of our children to handle their own work load. And I haven't even touched on the tremendous help it provided for me as I schedule our days. I use Sue Patrick's Workbox System right along with my high school daughter's schedule to make sure that my one on one time is scheduled perfectly for each child. This system allows me to easily see when my son will need me and when to schedule independent work for him while I work with my older daughter. If you put your mind to it and really read her book and understand the concept, try it as suggested for a while, and then adjust it to work best for your family. We have found a very happy medium with this and thank Sue Patrick for a tremendous product for homeschoolers. She took many ideas and trial and error and rolled it into a truly usable and helpful way to organize our days successfully!!
Pictures to follow below, check it all out!
Copyright 2009 Donna Campos |
