{"id":2148,"date":"2010-11-15T22:27:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T05:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/?p=2148"},"modified":"2010-11-21T00:08:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-21T07:08:52","slug":"our-homeschool-workbox-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/?p=2148","title":{"rendered":"Our Homeschool Workbox System"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a new homeschool mom, I have been frequenting many homeschool blogs for ideas, tips and any other helpful information I can find. One thing I have noticed is a lot of buzz surrounding the “workbox system”.<\/p>\n

Our first six weeks of homeschooling went well overall. But although our Sonlight curriculum breaks everything down daily\/weekly for me, I was still feeling a bit disorganized. It doesn’t help that we are currently on Week 8 for History and English, Week 5 for Reading (our most difficult subject), Week 3 for Science (which we added after we’d already started our school year), our Math isn’t broken up in the same way by weeks and I enjoy adding a lot of supplemental worksheets and tasks I find online.<\/p>\n

After reading this great post on workboxes by Confessions of a Homeschooler<\/a>, I decided I wanted to give the workbox system a try. So a couple of weekends ago, Greg and I visited one of my favorite stores, The Container Store<\/a>, to see what they had that could be used for a workbox system. I ended up deciding to get some elfa metal drawers similar to the ones that we had bought earlier this year to organize our large Lego collection.<\/p>\n

\"elfa<\/p>\n

We ended up buying two more of the elfa metal drawer systems. The one on the left with the 10 shallow drawers will be used for our homeschooling. Since our school room also doubles as my office and the playroom, the drawer set on the right is going to house popular toys, such as dress-up clothes, Duplos (yes, we have a lot of Legos AND Duplos), kitchen set supplies and toy animals.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/p>\n

We decided not to buy the particle board tops to the drawer systems that The Container Store sells. Instead, Greg made me one out of some leftover wood, stain and varnish he had in the garage from when he made me my kitchen island. I love that the top he made me is one solid table top instead of two separate ones like the store had because I can easily put some school supplies and my printer on top.<\/p>\n

Using our new drawers, we started our own version of the workbox system last week. What a difference it has made in our school day already! I am able to easily plan out our school day the night before (using a spreadsheet) and put each subject or task into its own drawer. When we start school, my daughter and I can both see how much schoolwork we have left before we are done for the day. Another bonus: we are actually getting more done in the same amount of time we had spent previously on our school day. I love this system.<\/p>\n

Right now I am only planning one day at a time and that seems to work fine for us.<\/p>\n

An additional benefit I hope to glean from this system is for my daughter to become more independent with some of her schoolwork. The Sonlight curriculum is literature based and since she is only now learning to read (she is in Kindergarten), that means that much of my time is spent reading to her. When we do have worksheets or other work that she could do on her own, she often wants me to sit with her and basically look over her shoulder as she completes the assignment and asks me lots of questions instead of trying to figure things out on her own. What I am working toward is have her work on her own, when it makes sense to do so, and turn in the assignment for me to grade later. I will be available for questions but I don’t want to be her crutch; I want her to try to figure things out on her own.<\/p>\n

Here is a picture from our workboxes today. You can see that we have already finished our first two assignments, as the drawers have already been emptied.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/p>\n

I do not do the subjects in the same order each day. My only loose guidelines (so far) are that I put reading near the top since it is our most difficult subject and I try to intersperse independent or fun activities so we don’t feel too bogged down by too many read-alouds in a row, etc.<\/p>\n

The beauty of the workbox system is that it is so customizable. Do a search for the workbox system and a lot of homeschool blogs will come up, each with their own version of the system. I have also joined some Yahoo groups that are just for workboxes and sharing ideas and free printables. How in the world did people homeschool before the internet? \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Do you use the workbox system or another organization system in your school day? Link me up in the comments; I would love to come check out how YOU do school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a new homeschool mom, I have been frequenting many homeschool blogs for ideas, tips and any other helpful information I can find. One thing I have noticed is a lot of buzz surrounding the “workbox system”. Our first six weeks of homeschooling went well overall. But although our Sonlight curriculum breaks everything down daily\/weekly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homeschooling","category-our-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2148"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2150,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions\/2150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noreimerreason.com\/amberandgreg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}