Spring Cleaning? Here Are 4 Homeschool Organizing Tips!

Spring is in the air which instantly stirs up a desire to get organized. All the piles of papers, unorganized bookshelves, and messy art supplies can leave anyone feeling frazzled. So where do you begin? Here are 4 organizing tips to get you off to a good start. Nothing creates a more peace than a fresh cleaned and organized home. Pull up your sleeves and let’s get to work.

1 Invest in bookshelves, rolling carts, bins, and paper trays
You will not be sorry you did. I am always picking up books at secondhand stores and ordering things online. Slowly but surely, I accumulate more homeschool stuff every year. The next thing that follows are piles of books because I have run out of shelf space. Don’t these piles and overcrowded shelves sneak up on you. Be sure you have plenty of space to keep your stuff organized and up off the floor.
 

2 Round up your posse!
Getting help will make organizing much faster. Get your kids involved or invite a friend over to help.

My kids and I have a cleaning routine we like to call “Report-Back-To-Me”.  I scour every nook and cranny in a room to find things out of place, I point, command, and tell my kids to put things away and then they immediately report back to me for their next task. I love it because I never leave the room but gather up all the stuff and see that its put where it goes.

I feel like a queen ant with her worker ants. It’s a very fast-paced cleanup game. The faster my kids move the sooner I will let them off the hook. We keep doing this until the entire room is pick up and organized. I send my kids on missions such as: go put this in the bathroom, put this in the dirty clothes, this goes in the trash, pull out anything from under the couch, pick up all the Legos, straighten up the book shelf, put this out in the garage.

Sometimes I set a timer for 15 minutes and we will work until the timer goes off, other times we work until that room is finished. My kids like the timer because then they know there will be an end to their “suffering”.

Do you have a dawdler? Sometimes one of my kids will take their time putting something away. So, being a clever mom, I tell my kids that the faster you report back to me once you’ve finished a task the sooner you will be done. The child who takes their time will work the longest. If they are fast I will tell them they can be done a minute or two before the other kids. This remedy has eliminated any kids who choose to stare at themselves in the mirror when they were on a mission to put something away in the bathroom.

3 Categorize and organize your stuff

Art & School Supplies
Organize all your art supplies, school supplies, markers, pencils, tape, paper, ribbon, and paper together. This shelf will be a go-to-place for any consumable school material or for a creative outlet.

Educational Stuff
Learning games, family games, sensory bins, playdough bin, globe, math wrap-ups or any other learning items need their own space to land. Keeping this shelf near a table would be handy for play and for putting things back where they belong.

Current School
Keep a shelf set aside for any current school materials that you, the teacher, need to access. You could even organize it even further and have a space for each child.

Want-To-Do-This-Year Shelf
 I always have good intentions but I have found my current school shelf can get filled with books or things that I want to do with my kids. My subconscious mind must be thinking that if I set the book on my current school shelf it will get it done. So, I started another shelf for things I wanted to do that school year or in the near future. Anything left of the shelf would often become the following years school if I didn’t get to it.

A Bin for Each Child
My kids each have their own bin with their current school work and books. It’s also a great place to put their artwork or random papers I find laying around the house. At the moment, we homeschool in our dining room so this has been a great method for us to dump their school work in their bin so we can transition to meal time.

Art Work & Treasures
Our kids love to make us pictures. Display them on a cork board or a string with clothes pins. Another alternative is to have a place for small treasures they find. Give your kids a shelf or table to display nature items they find or things they make.

Purge
We all accumulate things we think we will use and then it just sits and collects dust. Don’t be afraid to pass on books and curriculum to another family who might use it. If you can’t help the impulse to buy more books than my suggestion is to stock up on story books, picture books, and non-fiction books rather than too many teacher manuals or textbooks, they are timeless and can always be enjoyed without a lecture or lesson plan.

4 Daily Schedule
Last but not least, keep your daily or weekly school organized by using a lesson planner and school schedule charts. Stick to your schedule yet be flexible enough for things that come up because you know they will.

I read a quote in a book once that has stuck with me for most of my homeschooling journey, “The best schedule is the one God gives me each day”. Don’t stress if you miss a day or a week. You don’t have to sit through a lecture in a classroom setting to be able to learn. Homeschooling can happen in the most natural life moments...as you walk along the way. 

Don’t wait for motivation to come. Force yourself to just jump in and start organizing today! You will not regret it!