Tot-School Part Three: Organization

Organization or as I like to call it "Where the hey am I supposed to put all this stuff?", is one of the most important parts of homeschooling, in my humble opinion.  First of all, it is so hard to concentrate with stuff piled everywhere and its really hard to pull things out and work with your child when they show interest, if you're not even sure where or what pile you stuck that cute coloring page, craft or worksheet in.
Some families are blessed with a homeschool room others like myself have to be a bit more creative in figuring out where to put things, but all of us still need a plan on how to organizing what we have so we can easily use it.  For our tot-schooling, I printed off a letter of the week set I found online, (I'll place a link below) I also printed coloring sheets for our bible stories. 

My biggest issue was having so many recourses; toys, manipulatives and books and not knowing where I stuck them or even remembering to get them out. As much as we read, many favorite books were staying on the top of the pile and others weren't ever getting pulled off the shelf. I was printing coloring sheets for bible stories then not being able to find them when we got to that story.  Lots of good intentions but because I didn't want to feel that I was setting up a formal curriculum for such a young child I was just letting everything stay disorganized.  It has since occurred to me that I can both stay true to my "follow the child's lead" philosophy and be prepared for when she wants to "work" which is now happening daily.  So here's what I did...

I'm a huge fan of the file system and loop scheduling.  First I printed off our letter of the week sheets and coloring sheets, I gathered and sorted all the other cute things I've printed from my favorite blogs and I put each letter set in 26 weekly files I added in other sheets as well, I then went to the book shelf and took off all my daughters story books.  I left her large compilations, board books and of course her favorite bed time stories are still beside her bed, I'm talking about the 50 other books on the shelf that were hardly getting read.  I placed 2 books in each weekly file. then I sorted all the educational toys, games and manipulatives and placed them on the now empty book shelf, I made a list of these items alternating number, letter, shape, color etc. whatever skill they teach.  This list is now my loop schedule, every day we'll try to use one of the items on the list and when we finally reach the bottom of the list, we'll just start at the top again.

I did not try to set a number of work sheets, crafts or coloring pages per day, I just separated by weeks.  Some days my daughter just wants more and other days she stops at one, I'll let her lead the way.  My goal is to read the two books at some point during that week, again some days she wants to be read to over and over and other days we're lucky if we make it to the end of a second book.(she does love being read to)  by the end of the 26 weeks, she should know all her letters but even better, we will have read all of her books and there will be no more dust on those really cool learning toys I was so eager to buy haha

This nifty box is actually a wooden toy box, I took the file racks out of a broken file cabinet and placed them inside, hubby put in two strips of wood for a wooden silverware tray to slide on and I glued some cork tiles in the lid.  It's super handy storage as it also acts as our coffee table. 

Letter of the week printables