I love to organize things and I strive to find systems that will work not just for me, but also for my kids. If it's hard for them to put things away, then it just won't happen. In the 5 years I have homeschooled, I have discovered a few ways to help keep things in a relatively orderly fashion...umm...just don't come over this second...okay?!


Here is our workhorse bookcases from IKEA that house most of our history, Bible, Dr. Seuss and other subjects (in magazine holders).


The bottom shelf is holding jumbo magazine holders of our subjects that aren't used everyday or are the next round/level in a subject. I have found these holders on line for a huge amount of money, but have found them at Wal-Mart for around $5.00. I love how they keep all the books together and organized!


Here is our desk for the three kids. It is a hollow-core door varnished and mounted on our wall with roofing braces or something. My hubby made my day with this project! What you can't see is my door desk joined right next to it with my computer and paper-covered desk. When I find the top and have finished making my area "cute" I will be more than happy to share it will you all!


We use the jumbo magazine holders for all the core subjects that we use often (Language Arts, Math, History, Science). I love this system for keeping all our workbooks in an orderly fashion!


Along the desk, you'll find the three-ringed binders sandwiched between the magazine holders. Each child has a folder for History, Language Arts, Geography and Science. We keep all our papers for each child in these and they are working great so far!


The Langauge Arts Notebook is by far the greatest asset of these binders. We have 5 tabbed dividers with pockets for each LA subject (Spelling, Handwriting, Phonics, Grammar and Writing/Composition).


The assignments for the week are in the pocket of the dividers and the finished work gets 3-hole punched and placed behind the divider. It is working so well! Some days the kids want to finish more than one days work and so that has been a perk too! My kids also enjoy seeing how much work they have been accomplishing throughout the year.


Here is my second area of bookcases. The tall white one is primarily for our art supplies/books and our Science books.

• The top shelf has 2 red boxes with phonics games and the other with old magazines to use in art/science projects.
• The next shelf has a cute basket with flash cards, a few manipulatives and other random school things. It also has magazine holders for our construction paper and tin pails that hold our extensive colored pencil collection.

• Third shelf down is our Art library and believe it or not, more colored pencils, different types of coloring utensils and a cup of scissors.
• The fourth shelf is big buckets of pencils, big markers and fine markers and our cute color crayon caddy which you can read about here along with some other organizing ideas.
• The bottom 2 shelves are for our Science books.

Keeping up with all the homeschool stuff everyday is enough to drive you nuts! Today I am featuring a few ways I have organized our everyday items.

First I'll start off with a wonderful idea from some ingenious mom that submitted this idea to Family Fun magazine or Parents Magazine. I can't remember where I saw it. But kudos to her! It's practical, it's cute and it works!!!

Simply stated, it is using an old muffin tin along with some mini plant pots from a superstore (I got mine at ikea). They fit nice and neat in each muffin cup and the color crayons look awesome!

My husband thought it wouldn't stay nice and neat, but we have had our crayons like this now for several months and ZERO catastrophes! The kids love being able to find the color they need right away instead of digging through broken crayons in one big messy plastic box.

Next on the list is our simple way of keeping our colored pencils within arms reach. Like every good homeschool family, we started the year with individual pencil boxes for the kids. Each had their own stash of everything. This proved extremely problematic, because inevitably someone was getting blamed for breaking someones crayons, pencils etc. Because we use colored pencils so much throughout the day I put an end to the chaos and used one of those cute tin pails.

Now we have 3 pails of pencils, colored pencils and kid scissors within arms reach and they look cute! We got our pails at the 1 Spot at Target a few years ago. Cheap and cute! Who could ask for more?

Math time in our family is loaded with manipulatives! We are in the early stages of math and the counters are essential to our fun! The kids love using them, but they also love playing with them. I always would get crazy when they would dump them all out together and mix them up. The tiny plastic bags they came in were nothing short of frustrating and prone to breaking... So I came up with the ideal system.

Durable, colorful, hard to open (for toddlers and preschoolers)...so there wasn't constant dumping, and the right size for each set! We got these really cheap at ikea. I used my Dymo labler so we knew what we were looking for. The kids and I both LOVE them!

Any trip to the Library always warrants 100's of books, or so it seems, for a homeschool family. For me to keep track of which ones are the Library's and not ours, I place them in a wicker basket in our homeschool room. The kids know this is the "hot-spot" for new literature. It's one of their favorite places to snag a book to look at throughout the day.

Now that my second child is in Kindergarten, I have found that it's harder to keep track of their school books. I tried having a shelf for them, but the workbooks and softcovers were always "slouching" and then falling over or off the shelf. Bookends haven't worked very well either. Then there is the inevitable pile of books ready to slide onto the floor. This system is the most common, but the biggest eyesore. So I came up with a new system for our family.

The super huge magazine holders from an office supply store are now keeping things confined and not spilling out onto the floor. I am a visual person and so this helps remind me what we have and haven't done today...I need to get a few more for all the various workbooks we go through. These work great for all kinds of books and workbooks, but don't work with 3-ring binders.

So there you have it! Some of my organization in our school room. Hopefully as the days go by I'll have more great ideas to pass onto you! If you have some favorite ideas please share them! Hope you all have a wonderful day!

God Bless!!!!