Small Space Homeschooling Part 2: Books and Manipulatives.

Living in a small space means getting a little creative with how we organize our homeschool materials.  We're currently living in an apartment and no longer have an extra room to use as our school room.  That means revamping my organization for all our homeschool goodies.

   In Small Space Homeschooling Part 1 I shared our portable workbox with you.  That's where I place all of our materials needed for the coming school week.  It has helped make our days so much more enjoyable. 

Books:

Most of our books are on these bookshelves in my son's room.  For the most part, Bubba keeps from messing it up too bad. 

Up on the top we have a basket of arts and crafts kits.  This includes their art kits, weaving sets, and embroidery stuff.  I believe we also may have a couple of fashion design workbooks in there that belong to Squirrely Girl.

The top shelf houses books that specifically deal with our school year.  It includes current workbooks, textbooks, and many of the science and living history books we'll be using for the year along with My Father's World Learning God's Story  Our Unifix cubes and pattern blocks are up there as well, as well as Squirrely Girls  leveled readers.

The next two shelves house a good part of our other books that we use during reading time.

The second to bottom shelf is where we keep a bunch of our manipulatives.  They're numbered because we used to used these as our busy boxes and I just haven't relabled them yet.

• Box 1:  Holds some of our Language Arts work.  I have laminated various work heets that I sometimes add to the girls Daily folders.  We have some rhyme strips, punctuation strips, and antonym/synonym strips in here.
• Box 2:  Holds our geometry stuff.  We have some flashcards, drawing sheets, matching cards, and another set of pattern blocks.
• Box 3: Holds some of our Math stuff.  We have beans, marbles, number cards, ordering cards, craft sticks, shape buttons, a calculator, a set of 10 ten frames, number magnets, addition and subtraction flashcards, number bond bracelets, and more. 
• Box 4:  Holds pipe cleaners, string, and beads along with some pom poms.
• Box 5: Holds some of our alphabet work.  We have magnetic letters, alphabet puzzle cards, alphabet puzzle, upper and lower case matching cards, and some flashcards. 

The bottom shelf has some personal dry erase boards and a basket of coloring books, which I rotate out from our collection that we've accumulated.

 

Other Stuff:

This is our game closet.  I cleared off two of the shelves to accommodate all of our homeschooling stuff.



Here's the binder where I keep worksheets divided by week.
This makes pulling out our stuff for the week so much faster.

This is where we keep the kids nature journals, their reference binders, and a couple of my binders with reference sheets and weekly work in them.


The Clear 3 drawer Sterilite organizer holds their crayons, scissors, pencils, and markers as well as some drawing paper.  One drawer also has some laminated handwriting worksheets, as well as some activities that I'd like to eventually get to.

Do you have any tips on how to organize your school stuff in a small space?  Let me know how in the comments!

Small Space Homeschooling Pt. 1: Workbox system

I keep seeing all of these pictures of other families beautiful homeschool rooms, and I begin to daydream about all that I would do if I had an extra room to put all of our homeshooling stuff in.
 
We recently moved to a new state and are temporarily living in an apartment for at least the next year.  Since we have a lot less space in our new place, I've had to adjust how and where I'm storing stuff. 
 
First of all, I have our portable workbox system.  I'd love to have a cart to use for workboxes, but it just isn't possible with the limited space we're working with right now.  Instead, I use this Sterilite container with latchable lid.

Our Workbox contains:

• My Teachers Manual
• Student workbook
• A Spiral
• Daily folders for Squirrely Girl and Miss Bear (10 total)
• Our current lapbook
• 2 Clipboards
• Games for the week
• Manipulatives for the week

Daily Folders and Clip Boards:

We use daily folder in lieu of the workboxes due to space issues.  Each of my girls has a daily folder plus a clipboard that they use every day. 

 Here is an example of what I put in Bear's daily folder.  In one side she has her math sheet's for the day.  On the other side she has her handwriting work and a stack of flashcards what she'll be using to play a game that day. 

Usually math goes in the left pocket, and science stuff goes in the right hand one


 

Here's an example of Squirrely Girls Monday folder.  Since we do our science reading on Mondays, we usually don't have any work in the folder for that.  On the right is her four square card as well as her math worksheet.

The Expanded Form cards are in the right hand pocket.



 




I place any handwriting and Language Arts worksheets onto their clipboard the night before, and set it along with their daily folder onto the table so that it's ready for the next day.





 I usually reload the workbox and daily folders Friday evenings so that its ready for Monday morning.  This helps streamline our day.  Pretty much everything we need for our week is in one convenient place, so I'm not running around gathering things like a chicken with it's head cut off.

How do you organize your homeschool day?  I'd love to hear about how you make your day easier down in the comments!