Seton Magazine Catholic Homeschool Articles, Advice & Resources
Our Summer Simplification Project – Part 3
Welcome back everyone! I hope everyone is having a fun summer so far!
Our family has been working extra hard detaching, containing and systemizing all our rooms since Spring. This Mama is definitely looking forward to our beach trip this August :-)
Today, we’ll give you a quick tour of our office/classroom. We designated the left side of the room as our office and the center and right side became our classroom.
Our Office
This year, we detached from excess and unnecessary paper files, books, supplies, etc. We also archived our old files in the beginning of the year to make room for this current year’s files.
This beautiful desk was passed onto us and has two built-in filing cabinets.
The left side is where we store our current year files and the right side houses anything and everything to do with my Project Nazareth Apostolate. In our home, we file all our paperwork at the end of each month so it doesn’t pile up all over the house and distract us from our daily routine.
As far as systemizing, we found this box at a local thrift shop and use it to file everything that we will need for taxes at the end of the year.
Placing everything in this box at the end of each month makes it so much easier for us to collate everything at the end of the year. Once receipts are organized, we simply enter totals in a spreadsheet for each category, place them in sheet protectors, and submit everything to our tax preparer in one binder. Having a simple system like this saves so much time and energy during the craziness of tax season.
Our Classroom
Most of our schooling is done upstairs in our kitchen and dining room. Our classroom is a place where any of the children can go if they want to do some quiet reading or if they need a peaceful place to homeschool. It is also a place to store our extra books, supplies, activity kits and manipulatives.
This year, we detached from a large amount of homeschooling materials, especially those we have not used in several years. Since someone else could be using these items right now, we decided to pass them onto friends and neighbors who homeschool or plan to homeschool their little ones in the near future.
We designated this shelf to contain all the materials we knew we were definitely going to use during school year. The top shelf holds all our science experiment supplies.
The shelf below it houses all our children’s “specimen” and the basket to the left is where we store our son’s “nature treasures”.
The next shelf contains all our books on writing mechanics and different reading and activity kits the children enjoy. The shelf below is where we place our all time favorite storybooks and readers.
As far as systemizing, we used labeled binders to house all unused workbooks categorized by subject.
Another simple system that the children have enjoyed is to have their own designated summer boxes.
These boxes serve as a special place for each child’s favorite readers, arts and crafts kits, math worksheets, coloring books or anything and everything they want to learn and need to work on during the summer.
See You Again Soon
Thank you so much again for stopping by!
Next time, we’ll be looking at how we set up our Command Center upstairs which helps make our homeschooling day and the hustle and bustle of our daily lives run a bit smoother.
Until then… Happy Summer Simplifying!
