I've Managed to Stay Organized!

Usually homeschool bloggers talk about their organized school storage towards the beginning of the school year. I took pictures of my homeschool shelf back in August, but never got around to blogging about it. 

So.. I'm a little late.  What can I say?

Perhaps it is a good thing that this post is insanely late, because now I can brag that I haven't had to reorganize this little space mid-year like I've had to do in the past. 

That's HUGE for me! 

I'm no organizer, as we've been in our new house almost 2 years now and I'm still trying to figure out how in the world to get everything in its place, but I guess the trick is finding a system that works for you. 

Well, this system has worked well for me. I am proud to say that I have had an easy time to keep my shelves organized.

Are you ready for it? 

This is how it looked in August. 

These are deep shelves that are normally used in the garage. It's not very pretty, but it has tons of space so it does the job well, especially since I have so much stuff.  I attached a shower curtain to the top with some yarn to make it a little more attractive.

In case you're interested, here's how I organized everything. 

The first shelf is where I keep all the lesson plan and work books. They are kept in magazine boxes that I already had from a couple of years ago when I was trying to organize all our reading books. Behind those boxes are extra supplies that though they are "out-of-sight", they aren't "out-of-mind".

The left side of the 2nd shelf is organized by "subject" where I keep all of our visuals and manipulatives in baskets. Behind those baskets are extra manipulatives that wouldn't fit in the baskets. Again, they haven't been "out-of-mind". I've reached back there plenty of times to pull out what we need and then place them right back. 

The right side of the same shelf is our writing/coloring supplies. Last year, the kids had their own school box with all of their supplies in that. I was replacing supplies before the year was over. I did not want to do that again. This year, I thought I'd try to keep all the supplies together in their own boxes and we'd just pull out the particular box we needed for the day. This has worked very well. The only problem hiccup is reminding the kids to put the box back on the shelf when they are done with it. 

{That's not really a big deal though.} 

The 3rd shelf contains a stack of paper trays on the left and my supplies to the right of that. My "office", if you will. {smile}

The bottom paper tray is a stack of scrap paper the kids are allowed to use for drawing, writing, coloring or just cutting up. 

The next tray up holds all our construction paper. 

The next one up is Jonathan's tray. All of his paper work is placed in his tray when he's completed a worksheet, or whatever paper work he has done. 

The top tray belongs to Adelle. Her tray also contains all the paper work she's done this year. When we're done with this school year, I will go through both trays and keep the "important" papers, the one's that show progress, tests and anything I find too cute to toss. 

The very bottom shelf holds puzzles, play dough and learning games and a big box of future curriculum. I had no where else to store that. {shrug}

I have a small wooden shelf turned sideways that sits up against the main shelf. The wooden shelf holds all of our arts and crafts supplies. I must admit that I don't have that shelf organized very well. I don't have the energy to try to make it work smoothly, but we are consistent in returning the supplies back to that shelf, even if it isn't right back where we picked it up from. 

Here is what it looks like today. Not very different.    

{BIG SMILE}