- So the new school year is coming up very soon,
actually, for some people, I think it's already started.
We've had a school year round, but I do take this time to
get reorganized, to order new curriculum
and things that I need.
I do like usually a little back to school shopping,
get a couple new outfits for the kids
and just kind of take this time as like a refresher
for our year.
First of all, I guess I should introduce where we are.
This is our dining room table space.
This is my primary zone for my homeschooling stuff.
I have figured out over time that I really prefer
our dining room table and this zone as like our main zone,
and then we're near couches,
and I like to do our reading lessons on the couch
or like even on the ground in the living room.
I just like to spread out sometimes if we need it
and cuddle up sometimes if we need that.
And as our kids have gotten older,
they're doing more online courses,
and those actually work best in quiet spaces where the kids
can kinda be on their own,
and not being too loud for us,
we don't have to worry about like having conversations
in the background of the classes.
So usually they go and they do that in our office space
or in their bedroom, or even outside.
Generally with the noise conversation issue,
we try to keep that in its own space.
It doesn't need much like basically just a spot where
they can plop a computer works fine, so we don't set up
a dedicated space for that.
I feel like I've seen so many new families setting up
distance learning stations and getting into homeschooling
or at least school at home,
and also I see so many home schoolers go through
this period where they try to recreate school
at their house, that is not necessary.
It might be for your child
and your student and that is totally fine.
Like if you feel like that is absolutely what they need
to normalize their school experience great,
set up a space that feels a lot like school.
However, one of the awesome things about homeschooling
is you can also make it a more comfortable, enjoyable space
that just works best for their learning style.
So I want you to really consider that, be open to embracing
something different and not needing to recreate exactly
a school setting, because it isn't
the best learning environment for all children.
So, keep that in mind, especially if you're low on space,
don't think that that means
that you can't do this, because you can.
And as I said before, even outside can be a great space
for them to do schoolwork.
So if you're able to send them out to a backyard
or even a front yard, and let them do their work there,
that might be an awesome solution,
especially if you're limited on space
and you're trying to figure out
how to do the whole distance learning
and juggling multiple kids and maybe working from home now
or something like that.
So, as far as our space, we have these awesome cabinets.
And I got them from IKEA years ago
and the shipping was horrendous.
It took a long time to get to me, it was pretty rough
and they're big and heavy, but they're great.
Okay, the other thing I will say, and this isn't necessary,
but I have wanted to make my space
a little bit like cuter this year,
I'm not saying I achieved it,
but that's something I'm working on,
like I'm working on making it just like a prettier,
nicer space trying to get us a little bit more motivated
to keep it organized.
However, I know, that this will become a giant mess,
at least at some point.
And that doesn't mean that the next day
it won't be cute again, but there's a reality that this
becomes messy and that's okay.
So I like for the kids to have their curriculum stored in
little bins.
I feel like it's really easy to say grab your bin,
let's go do some work and we can kind of go anywhere,
as I said before, couch, floor,
other room, wherever, it just makes it portable,
It makes it easy for them to sort their work.
I find that putting things like in the shelves like this
with so many kids, it ends up being hard to sift through
and things also have different shapes,
especially when you know,
like you've got preschool activities,
like we have for Duncan,
all the way through older kid activities and it just doesn't
always work and like math manipulatives
and things like that.
So I feel like bins have really been the best for us.
We got these bins and then I printed out their names
and laminated them and glued them to the bins
and we glued them to the sides as well,
so that either way you could see who's bin it was.
I also made them kind of colorful because I like a little
pop of color and I let the kids pick out their colors.
And they really enjoyed that and they feel a little bit more
involved in the process so that was nice.
Down here I have some books and things that aren't currently
like totally I use but might be throughout the year.
Here I have some like note cards
and additional reading elements,
and these are their readers that they do,
and in here I have extra supplies.
So this is kind of a quick grab bin of art supplies
that we often need, I have some pens,
and some colored pencils that are kind of fun,
but not super easy to sharpen, but they're cute.
These are some fine tip pens for the older kids
and these ones are markers that anybody can use
but they work well for our littlest.
I have these tins that I actually made years ago.
It's just a tin can and I opened up with a safe can opener
that leaves the edges not too rough,
and then I covered it with a fabric that I like,
and we use these for our art supplies.
There are a couple glue sticks in here as well,
some scissors and then we have a couple small rulers
and hole punchers.
This container here has our sharpies in it kinda hidden
because some of my kids have a bad reputation with sharpies,
and this container fit crayons really nicely,
and here are some colored pencils,
and here are some general pens,
and you'll find that right now my cupboard
have a lot of things like pens and pencils.
I haven't fully organized this as much as I like,
mostly because I think I'm gonna be taking out these
lighter blue bins and replacing them with more clear ones.
This one should be just typical lead style pencils
with erasers on them.
This is also like in the work,
so I haven't ordered everything,
I haven't gotten all like back to school supplies yet,
but I have been working a lot on it,
so I wanted to share it with you guys
and show the process a little bit.
In general, my life is always in process,
and I never know if I'm going to fully complete a job,
so I wanted to share where we're at now
because it is working.
I got these trays from Amazon
and it came in like a colorful four pack,
and I really like them.
They're great for messy crafts,
and they also fit paper in them really well,
so, I'll show you, I have some plain paper in here
and some colorful paper, and it made it so that the paper
wasn't like falling all over the place
and it just kind of looks nice still,
but it's really easily accessible,
and often we need the paper for these craft trays.
So that's been a really nice solution.
Up at the top here is my hidden paper.
This paper is double the length of typical paper
and I got it so that the kids could practice drawing a map
of the world from memory because that's a goal I have
for them.
However, they like to get into this paper,
and they like to cut it up and draw a little tiny
drawings in one corner,
and they could totally use regular paper,
but for some reason they like this paper,
so I have to keep it off limits and up high.
And then I think next to it right now is just more
regular paper but I'm probably gonna change that.
This other area, which is just the next cabinet over,
I have these binders,
they're actually totally empty right now,
this is where we're going to store
the work that the kids complete or records of their work.
So I like to have that nearby, so when something finishes
or if I wanna add something to this,
it's just really easy to do.
Otherwise, that stuff tends to kind of pile up
and get lost or messy or ruined or turned into art.
And also because I'm trying to be cute,
I printed out their names in the same fonts
as I did with the bins that they have,
If you didn't notice that before,
It's really important to me that you noticed that,
I'm trying, okay?
And then I have some empty bins right here,
which I'm really proud of, because I'm a person who likes
to use up every bit of open space and I'm hoping that
by kind of taking up this space with the empty bins,
I'm not jamming it full of stuff right now,
but instead these are sort of placeholders for whatever
I need to add to this zone as the year progresses.
Right and here I have some little laminated manipulatives
that I made and some play dough for Duncan to give him
something to do when he needs a distraction.
This right now has one extra pair of scissors
and the other ones are all scattered around the house
somewhere, so I'm hoping to find them, capture them
and keep them here in captivity.
So I have that other 10 scissors
and then this is going to be
where I hide the other scissors,
because we have so many scissors.
My guess is we probably have at least 10 pairs of scissors
around the house, and people are just always running off
with them which is very typical in households
and I try not to be too aggressive
about controlling the scissors.
I also probably need to get better about being aggressive,
about controlling the scissors because,
it stinks to not have your scissors, right?
And then I have extra glue sticks in here
because we use a lot of glue sticks.
And I have extra pens and highlighters and things like that
in this bin.
Down here is some space
that I have not really gone through yet,
we have some of the past binders
with past achievements down there.
And then also we have some great books down here
that are considered living books for the most part.
Basically, there are books that are very entertaining,
but you also learn while you're reading them,
so I like those to do like read alouds with the kids,
in here I have a bunch of CDs, we haven't used CDs,
I don't think this whole year,
but we've used them a lot in the past
with our homeschooling, but for this past year,
we were going in the car a lot and we would use CDs while we
were driving to do additional learning,
so I always have a bunch of CDs but I kinda feel like
I need to go through my collection
and reduce especially since I do use a lot of audible
and stuff now, but I know that there are some CDs
like story of the world,
which we love that aren't on audible.
I don't think,
I know the CD collection will be going away entirely.
And then these are other like past
Math and geography manipulatives that I need to clean up
or make a decision on if we're going to be
using them this year.
Okay, so this is our least cute, visible section
and I'm trying to figure out
how to make it look less of like
a dark black hole over here,
and this color doesn't really work,
this is still definitely a work in progress on this side,
but I still wanted to show it to you guys.
So this whole section is the kids 3D printer,
they love their printers.
Jake has been working really hard on designing his own
3D prints, up here we have a bunch of science supplies,
and right here we have more CDs.
Why do we have so many CDs?
Up there I think it's stuff that I haven't gone through yet.
This has been turned into extra pantry,
because I don't have a pantry in my kitchen
and I'm always trying to find shelves
where I can stick our extra food,
so that's what's going on here.
This bin is kind of sad, that's our bin of supplies
from outside activities that the kids used to attend
regularly, and we would have bins set up for when the kids
went to baseball or something called Awana or whatever,
and they would grab all their like base or his glove,
or whatever those things are
they were supposed to be stored in there
and they could grab them easily
when we needed to get out of the house in a hurry so far,
we're not going to be using those this year.
But we'll see how the year goes, right?
And then this is a really cool set.
I'm really excited about it,
this is a whole giant set from somebody called
the Therapy Mama on Teachers Pay Teachers,
so if you're looking for great printable curriculum ideas,
you can go to Teachers Pay Teachers, print it out,
you can laminate it or present it however you prefer too
if you don't have a laminator just have tons of stuff.
So, that's what that is,
It's my little collection of stuff from there.
So remember earlier I told you that I often have binders
that like need to be filled.
This is kind of the space for that.
So a lot of this in here is stuff that the kids have
completed, or artwork that they wanna save,
or whatever and I just don't have time in the moment
to do something with it, I have a little bin,
that I put stuff in and it keeps us organized,
that stuff becomes less messy, and we can find it later,
so I really like having this sort of backup bin
for when I'm in a hurry and just don't have time to deal
with whatever thing they've created in that moment.
This is our laminator and our lamination pages,
we can actually plug it in right next to the table
so it's stored right there and we use it a lot right now.
And I feel like that tends to happen right at the beginning
of the school year because we're like prepping everything
and we kinda remember we have it and everybody gets excited
about it because laminators are awesome.
That's where that is right now.
Oh, so I have a baby in my arms all of a sudden.
Hello little Mr. Cutie, I actually thought I had just
finished but I forgot to show you that, this is where
we slide our dry erase board back there behind the shelf.
So I wanted to make sure you saw that
because, and we use that a lot in our homeschool routine.
We also have a bunch of art supplies
and stuff that we usually keep out in the garage
and now let's go find daddy for you mister.
Say bye bye,
bye bye.
And that's basically it, like other than showing you that
we have couches that we plopped down onto
and that the kids take their laptops up to their room
for whatever things they're doing.
That's our setup, I really like it,
It definitely works for us,
It does get messy but that's life.
And it's not too hard to clean up.
Especially with younger kids, they have trouble with putting
books lined up and bookshelves,
so we were having a lot of trouble with that in the past
when we did it differently,
and I think that this works really well,
so I should show you what the whole thing looks like.
Is this guy posing, you like it?
I'm so happy, home school space.
Can you guys tell I have a selfie stick?
The power, so there it is so far, this is our space,
and I'm really excited about the upcoming school year.
I love that there are a lot more online resources
being offered.
My kids really enjoy online classes,
I'm looking forward to pushing ourselves in new ways
and trying out new things.
I actually really enjoy that as a challenge.
I like being presented with something that's like,
completely different or even a little bit uncomfortable.
And figuring out solutions,
I do feel like we are a little bit at the point
where the kids are starting to get a bit stir crazy,
and it is starting to feel like more and more of the same
and like kind of wanting to escape, like, go to another city
or go to friends houses,
but I still feel like we're able to make it fun
and interesting, I don't know, we'll see.
I'd love to hear what you're concerned about
for the upcoming year, and I'd love to begin that dialogue
and figure out how we can come up
with solutions for each other,
we're all in different circumstances, and we're all facing
things in a different way than we ever have before.
So let's talk about it and let's be kind to each other
and be loving for whatever decisions we're all making,
because everybody is in a different situation,
everybody's in a different place,
the risk levels are different, depending on where you are.
So please keep this a safe space.
And remember that even if you're feeling one way,
another person could be in a completely different situation.
So don't rush to judge or rush to anger
and talking with people about this stuff.
Love you guys.
I hope that this helped.
If there are any other things
that you're looking for help about,
please put them in the comment section,
I'll be making more videos like this
over the next month or two, so please ask away,
ask me anything,
I can't speak to everybody's experiences,
but I can do my best from my personal experience
to share what we've learned
and what's worked for us and what hasn't.
(laughing)