Spring Cleaning

of the homeschooling variety!  I have gotten it in my head to spend our week off for spring break getting ready for next school year.  I know, it sounds crazy to me, too.  Anyway, today I tackled the closet I keep our homeschool books and resources in.

Oh my.  And I call myself organized.  I took everything out and weeded through what I can keep for future years and what needed tossing or could be sold.  Then I spent the morning/afternoon logging in all my resource materials into my librarything.com account.  This is a step I have been meaning to do for a while and I encourage fellow homeschoolers to do as well.  Cataloging your resource material saves you so much time, frustration and really maximizes your lesson planning.  I love librarything because it’s easy, free (or really cheap for those with a lot of books like me) and I can print up my completed library for future reference.

Here is a pic of my catalog of children’s books.  I love that it allows me to have all this info at my fingertips!  I can see a pic of the book, see tags of what info is in the books, etc.  When I am lesson planning, say a study on rocks, I can whip out my librarything list and quickly scan the tags section for any books we already own about rocks.  I can not tell you how many times I reference this list and how much time and effort it has saved me this year.  I know a lot of you could just whip up a database on the computer, but for me librarything is just easier (and has the pics!)

So today I created a catalog of just my homeschool resources.  I have been in dire need of this as I have so many downloaded lapbooks or unit studies, or other various resources that I forget what I have already got!  Now a quick look at my list will enlighten me.  :)  So simple, but so effective.

Well here we go!  Much, much better.  I have my teaching resources on the shelf along with a space for ds3 and ds4’s materials.  On the floor I have a file crate with supplies such as file folders, construction paper, newspapers, etc., a 3 drawer  bin filled with school supplies and various posters.  All ready and waiting for me to plan away!  I am very pleased to be done with “step one” of my homeschool spring cleaning and I think it will keep me motivated with my planning next week.  Of course, I think we can still fit in a trip or two to the beach…