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How To Organize Your Homeschool

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In this post I am going to show you how to organize your homeschool with Evernote. At the end of this post I am also sharing a free copy of my Trello board which I now use together with Evernote to plan and organizine our homeschool.

When we were in NJ we were lucky to be limited by very little when it came to homeschooling. We did not have to report with portfolios or make our young people take standardized testing. Not having to “prove” that we were learning certain things at certain times, we had a lot of freedom to let them really follow their passions with learning, delve deeply into things they found interesting, and spend as much time on any given subject that they like.

*Update* We have been homeschooing in PA for about 3 years now (and this baby you see below is now 8!) and although I was terrified at first of the requirements (PA is notiriously difficult to homeschool in, especially when you unschool or self-direct like we do.) but after some deep breaths and a lot of research I definitely found a way to keep to our way of homeschooling and still complete the reporting requirements. If you have questions about how to self-direct or unschool in your homeschool, please reach out to me here and I would be happy to get you started. You can also join our Facebook group, You Can Homeschool.

OK, let’s get back to organizing your homeschool with Evernote.

I started using evernote when my oldest son was  3 1/2 – he has been coming up with up with his own exploration ideas since so having somewhere to keep track of it all is super helpful. Some days it’s hard to keep up with all of his ideas! While I didn’t need to keep a portfolio of our work for reporting purposes (and certainly didn’tt need to at this young of an age) I find that I love journaling these moments of our day.

how to organize your homeschool with evernote

Benefits of journaling your homeschool with evernote:

  •  Memories! This is one of the biggest reasons for me. It will be so nice to look back and see all of the ways he was growing and exploring from such a young age-for me and well as for my son (S!).
  • This does act as a portfolio should you ever find the need for one. While I don’t need one now, I am sure that at some point  my son will need some type of documentation for something and it would be nice to have this already at hand then to have to go back through the years and think of everything we have done.
  • Having a journal of passions, interests, and projects helps to inspire and keep on track with works in progress, as well as provides a jumping off point for future projects. In Lori Pickard’s book Project-Based Homeschooling, Mentoring the Self-Directed Learner, I found her idea of hanging photos of recent trips and pictures of your young person working on their projects hanging around their workspace to be very helpful. O often looks at pics of things he was doing and is re-inspired to finish something of gets a shoot-off idea from that.
  • It’s a great way to keep track of useful resources that you find and use along the way.

Organizing your homeschool

Now, onto how to keep all this stuff in order. I definitely keep paper artwork (some of course, I literally do not have the space for all of it) and other memorabilia from trips, holidays, ext.  As far as daily journaling, to be honest, by the time nighttime rolls around and I would have a chance to sit and handwrite in a journal (or type for that matter) I am so tired and have probably forgotten half of what we have done.

The solution? Evernote. Inspired by this post over at City Kids Homeschooling, I decided to give Evernote a try for journaling and documenting our days.

How to use evernote organize your homeschool:

  • Create a notebook
  • for each new activity I want to document I create a note within that notebook
  • We keep it really simple right now. I have one notebook for all of O’s stuff, and notes from all activities we want to record go in there. Later, I may separate into different notebooks as needed. (I have since added a new notebook for my other son)
  • In each note I can quickly add in a picture, a few notes, any links we were using, ect.
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The main menu. using notebooks and notes section only at this point.

 

List of notes in O's project and interest notebook
List of notes in O’s project and interest notebook
Individual note with simply photo and a few quick notes
Individual note with simply photo and a few quick notes
Note with link to website we were using along with a quick note
Note with link to website we were using along with a quick note.

Conclusion

Using Evernote to organize my homeschool has a lot of benefits. I now use this in combination with Trello for planning- at the bottom of this post you can download a copy of the trello board I created and use it for planning your homeschool. one of the best things about using Evernote for recording is that it really doesn’t interrupt anything we are doing. In just a few quick minutes (or minute) I can jot this stuff down and be on with it. Later, when I want to organize (which I usually do quarterly, or seasonally) I can sync to my computer and organize away when I have time.

So what do you think? Do you already have an organizing system that works for you or are you still looking for your perfect method?

Grab your free copy of the Trello Board I use to plan my homeschool below!

(make a copy once you open it so you have a clean slate to add your items)

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What Other People Think

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My oldest son has this hat-a fox hat to be precise. It started out as a regular Winter hat that I picked up along with his Winter coat. Then it changed into something else, or rather many things. At any given time it can be a costume of whatever he is pretending to be at the moment. It can also be comfort in a situation that he feels uneasy about.

Today it was unseasonably warm here- freakishly warm-it was 80 degrees in March. As we packed up for a walk to the park, my son, wearing a tee shirt and light pants put on his Winter fox hat and headed for the door.

I told him it was hot out and he would probably want to leave the hat here today. He told me he needed it for his lizard costume (We are knee deep in habitats and all of the workings of cold-blooded animals. During any of our intensive explorations he always ends up in character, he really gets in there!.) Then this happened:

Me: “You really should leave the hat here today, bud.”

O: “Why?”

Me: “Well, it’s hot, and people might say ‘why are you wearing a Winter hat when it’s so hot out.'”

As soon as it came out of my mouth I wanted to suck it back in. One of the most important things I want to instill in my kids is that they should do what makes them happy, not what other people tell them should make them happy. I want them to learn how to let their decisions come from inside them, not from outside influences.

So why would I say something so contrary to this principle? Why would I tell him that he should do something based on what other people will think? I said it because in all my efforts to instill this strength of character in him, my protecting mother side cringes at the thought of him being hurt by someone’s words of taunt or criticism. But in that moment I realized in an effort to protect him I was taking away the type of experiences that would build that character up in him in the long run. If I wanted him to stand up for himself and for what he wants and believes in , I better not get in his way while he is learning to make his own decisions.

So I took it back.

Me: “Bud, I don’t like what I just said, so I’m going to change it. You wear your hat if that’s what you want to do. Because it does’t matter what other people think. You should do what makes you happy.”

And before I had a chance to explain that to him further, he explained it to me.

O: “Right. Because they can just do what they want to do and I’ll just do what I want to do. It’s fine, mom.”

Yup. It was one of those days. One of those days when my kids teach me something really important. So, really, just a day, like any other day. Learning, changing, growing-no matter what other people think.

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Let Them See You Sweat

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IMG_8513-2IMG_8514IMG_8507-2IMG_8508IMG_8511-2Last week we took home this gorgeous pop up book called Welcome to the Neighborwood from out library. Seriously, maybe the coolest pop-up book I’ve seen to date.

After the first reading and a little discussion about how these animals all work alongside each other in their “neighborhood” my son declared, “let’s take the wasp out of the book so we can play with it”

welllll, no. We can’t deface property, and mom’s soul dies a little when people tear things out of books. But being an unschooler, I wanted to find a way to “yes” to his desire to play with the wasp while still keeping the book intact.

Enter my suggestion that we make one the next morning.

Saturday morning arrived and we set up shop at the table, with much coffee, ready to craft a 3 dimensional potter wasp.

Turns out this was a great opportunity to let my son watch me do something that I am not very good at, or in unschooling lingo, an area in which I m underdeveloped. So we worked together, but I did do most of it. He watched me mess up, struggle to understand how certain things were supposed to go together, and make a joke about howe when I try to think of things in 3-D I can actually feel my brain hurting.

“are you just joking mom?”

“kind of…but I swear I can feel it growing.”

We sat with that for a minute.

It was a fun activity and a great opportunity to show him that mom also has to tackle things that she doesn’t completely understand or particularly enjoy  in order to achieve a desired end goal. As an unschooling mom, I am often asked, “If your kids don’t have to do things they don’t like, how will they ever learn things like, math, reading, writing? What if they don’t like them?” The Answer? Of course they will learn all of those things when they need them to achieve something they want.

I think John Holt has a great explanation for this when he was asked by a reader, “Without school will they have the opportunity to overcome or do things that they think they don’t want to do?”

“I’m not sure what this question means. If it means, will unschooled children know what it is to have to do difficult and demanding things in order to reach goals they have set for themselves, I would say, yes, life is full of such requirements. But this is not at all the same thing as doing something, and in the case of schooling usually something stupid and boring, simply because someone else tells you you’ll be punished if you don’t. Whether children resist such demands or yield to them, it is bad for them. Struggling with the inherent difficulties of a chosen to inescapable task builds character; merely submitting to superior force destroys it.”

 

This Q & A is from John Holt’s book, Teach Your Own, a great resource is you are interested in, or considering unschooling.

So, the next time you are tackling something that you struggle with, let your kids watch- Because kids just love to see their parents struggle! Just kidding, it’s a great opportunity for them to see that grown-ups have a hard time with things and have to overcome challenges, just like they do.

Happy Sunday!