How To Get Organized

Finally, something you can sink your teeth into! I hope for this to be the first installment in an ongoing series of posts on how to get organized! Organizing is one of my favorite hobbies. I love bins and binders and cute storage things. Unfortunately things like price sometimes get in the way of my ability to put everything into a nice little package. Let's face it, if you're going to homeschool joyfully, you have to have some semblence of organization. It is really hard to teach if you can't find your books, or if it takes you half the morning to organize the lessons for the day. So today I am going to tell you about one of the things I learned that has helped to keep our little world organized.

A number of years ago I got myself a sturdy 2" binder and some dividing pages, even a few with pockets on them. In the first part of my binder is our calendar. On one side of the page is a place for notes and phone calls, the other side is divided into seven rectangles (yes, one for each day of the week). If I knew how to put PDF files on my blog for you to download, I would put my example here. Since I don't know how (help!), just use your imagination and see if you can create something on Excel, or send me a comment and I can try to email you a copy. I try to write all the important information from phone conversations on here, too, so that I don't have a bunch of scrap pieces of paper floating around. After that, the binder is divided into various sections. The first is where I keep my pre-printed grocery list (you guessed it, that's another post), next I have a section for all those nifty lists you get in the email with all those tips that you want to remember (like how to get sticky stuff off your carpet). Next is a section for flyers and info that pertain to the adults in the house (like flyers about Miles Christi RETREATS) and after that section comes the biggest: All the newsletters and schedules for all of our homeschool activites. This way I can always locate the information about the next meeting without having to look at the newsletters all the time. Actually, the possibilities for sections are endless. It all depends on your family structure. Think about things that you always seem to be misplacing and make a section for it. This binder stays right by the phone and everyone knows that this is the place to look when they need to know what is going on.

Well, dinner is calling. Hope that helps! God Bless!