A Homeschool File System For The ENTIRE School Year

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Whether you love a good organizational hack or not, keeping your school work organized is nearly vital to the homeschool experience. In fact, many states require it for good record keeping. While California (where we are) isn’t one of those states, our homeschool file system has been a huge blessing by lowering the stress of lesson planning, keeping our week on track, and organizing the school work that eventually becomes keepsakes (hand-print artwork, anyone?).

This file system is a bit of a time investment upfront. However, I can get it set up in a day, and once complete I’m able to see our entire school year laid out in front of me. Plus I can completely skip lesson planning. Yep, no overwhelming lists, no “falling behind”, no issues caused by taking a day, or even a week off. Writing it down would basically consist of writing down what’s in each folder, which is redundant and unnecessary.

This is based on Kristi Clover’s crate system, so be sure to check out her organizational course here! Lots of great tips for keeping your homeschool year running smoothly!

Here’s how we use a homeschool file system to keep our school year organized:

So here’s what you’re going to need to get started:

• A hanging file storage box
• Hanging files (one for each week of your school year. Example- 36 hanging files for 36 weeks of school.)
• Color files (a separate color for each child in your homeschool)
• Your core school curriculum. I use this exclusively for math, language arts, and science. You can read about our curriculum choices for the current year (Second grade and Kindergarten) here. History, geography, Latin, etc. are stored separately. However, they could be added. Make it work for you.
• Sticky tabs. I use these to mark our breaks. We keep to a Sabbath schedule, six weeks of school then a one week break. So there is an orange sticky tab after every sixth hanging file to mark our week off.
• Paper clips. I use these to separate subjects within the weekly files. So math gets paper clipped together, science is together, and so on.

A closer look at how to set up your homeschool file system:

Once you have your core subject curriculum picked out for the school year, tear it up. Yep, rip the books up. We use mainly Master Books curriculum and their books are already set up with perforated pages. So I’ll go through and rip out a week’s worth of work at a time. Thankfully Master Books also provides a “Scope and Sequence” schedule at the front of their books. So deciding how much work equals one week is super easy. If you use curriculum that isn’t perforated, you can take a straight edge to it, or take it to Office Max, Staples, etc. and they will cut the spine off for you.

Why rip the pages out?

I have a few reasons for this. Having multiple books organized in a file system eliminates the possibility of misplacing a book. It also makes our year ultra-visual for me. I can see it all lined up and I’m a very visual person. And finally it keeps my kiddos focused. No flipping to the next page and getting distracted. I can take one page out put it on a clip board and they can stay focused. Not to mention having it on the clipboard is great for car-school, or anywhere-school really. Portability!

Once the pages are ripped out, I organize them into the color file folders. Squeaks folders are red and Little Dude is green. Right now in Kindergarten, Little Dude has very little in his folders, but Squeaks are full with all of her weekly lessons. And when Flash starts school I’ll add a third color. Everyone, all of our curriculum, in one file box!

So if you were to take out the red folder in the “week 1” hanging file you’d find Squeaks math, science, and language arts for that week, each separated by a paper clip, any of my activities we’re currently using such as my math robot, or U.S. Puzzle, and her current spelling and math flash cards.

At the end of each week whatever work we finished goes back to the hanging folder and the hanging folder moves to the back of the file box.

Any work we didn’t complete or activities we are going to continue using in the next week gets moved to the next week’s color folder. There’s no falling behind, it just moves to the next folder. And since there are no dates, only week numbers, it can just keep going, like a giant loop schedule!

 

Master Books is very gentle and their suggested workload is very doable, so it’s rare that work goes uncompleted, but when it does there’s no stress! And it’s the same for moving faster through the work. If Squeaks completes her math for the week early, we can simply take the math from the next folder and move it up. Easy.

For Squeaks kindergarten and first grade year this file system was exclusively what I used to stay on task.

When Squeaks entered second grade and I added Little Dude into the school mix I found reverse planning to be a helpful added tool. Reverse planning is basically just writing down what we accomplished that day. A reverse of writing what we want to get done. It’s a great way to keep track of where we are in our loop schedule and what we need to focus on each day.

In my quest to find the simplest planner ever I ended up with a teacher’s planner for the Target Dollar Spot. But even that had big sections of the book I didn’t use. No need for a seating chart here. So I made my own and it’s available for you to print as well in my free Printable Library! It really is as simple as it gets. Just weekly pages separated by day and school subject, and a simple book list tracker. Just right for reverse planning.

The homeschool file system has taken so much stress out of our day and helped keep us organized and on task. If you’d like to see our file system in action I encourage you to check out my Instagram page. I have an entire highlight on this system and how to set it up.

Take me to the FREE Printable Library!

Is this something that would work for your homeschool? What’s your favorite way to keep school work in order and on track?