Homeschool Book Organization

So, continuing on with Preparation H.  Yesterday I completed the two-day task of organizing all the books we use for homeschooling.  I now know every book in this house.  :)  Since I have the memory of a 45yo woman, I catalogued our collection for future reference.  I used Library Thing, an online catalogue for your books.  I have had an account with them for years.  It’s cheap, easy to navigate and has plenty of useful features.  When I was on The Homeschool Crew I was given a copy of Book Collector, but I will tell you now that Library Thing is much much more user friendly.  Much.  Specifically for me, I could easily tag and group book collections.  I have a “children’s library” collection for the kids’ fiction and a “homeschool resources” collection for reference and curriculum items.  It is easy enough to input books in each program, but with Library Thing it only takes a click of the mouse to group, tag, delete, etc.  Here is the lay of the land for our organized book collection.  Fanfare, please…

899999uAQ0000000000000000000N  (um, I walked away from my computer for a minute and came back to this.  My cat Ellie apparently had something important to add.)

This is a 5 shelf big plastic thing in the schoolroom.  The reference items and curriculum are stored here.  I have them grouped loosely by subject and put in labeled magazine holders.  (In the dollar section at Target right now, hurry, that is a STEAL.)  Each item is in my “homeschool resources” collection on Library Thing and tagged with appropriate descriptions of their contents.  Now when we do a study of something I can search the tags in my collection and go right to the box the resource is stored in.

This is my super duper had it for YEARS custom bookshelf courtesy of dh.  The kids’ fiction is stored here, grouped as best as I could and taking up two shelves.  The rest are MINE, ALL MINE!  Sorry, I get a little crazy about my books. 

I printed up a listing of both collections.  The fiction list I printed in a plain list form, title and author.  The homeschool resources list is printed with a small pic of the cover, title, author and tags.  I can easily refer to these lists and even take them with me when I am shopping or at a book sale to make sure I don’t already have a title.  And yes, while doing this project  I found 5 different books that we had more than one copy of.  Never again!  This was quite time consuming and ever so a little boring but completely worth the effort in the end.