Getting Ready for the New Homeschool Year Series – 2 Homeschool Room Cleanout

After I do my curriculum  planning for the coming year, my next step is to make the space available! In other words, clearing out schoolwork from past year, filing them away, going through resources, decluttering and reorganizing. By April, I start counting the days for the year to be done… Most subjects may have already been completed, but we finish up the remaining subjects until  middle of May.  It’s such a nice feeling to get rid of the old, prepare for the new and start afresh! 

We are blessed to have a separate room dedicated for homeschooling. Some homeschoolers choose to school in the kitchen/ dining area. Wherever you homeschool, it is  important to make the space available!

I basically lump my schoolroom summer cleanup  into 2 main categories- curriculum/schoolwork cleanout (steps 1, 2) and physical cleanout (steps 3, 4, 5). 

1)The first thing I do with homeschool summer cleanup is filing away schoolwork. Throughout the year, I dump most of the work done from their ‘working folder’ into a bin specifically for that purpose, above my teachers desk. This includes worksheets from home, outside classes, projects, artwork etc. (Some of the work I know I don’t want to save, I dump into the trash right away, for example: halfheartedly written manuscript pages, and the like.) So during summer cleanup, I go through the bin, and save the stuff I want to save for each kid. I am very selective in what I save. I only save  few representative samples for different things we did- some of the best writing assignments, few good handwriting sheets, all the math tests (in math, I require mastery so they are to get above 90% on all the tests to move on to the next level), best of art work etc. I store these papers in clasp envelopes with the students name, grade and academic year written on the outside. These clasp envelopes are stored in crates at the top of our schoolroom bookshelves. Bulkier projects and crafts that are hard to store, I take a snapshot of the item, and upload it to their digital portfolio. After I go through all the papers in the bin and do the needed, I happily toss all the rest of the paper into a trash bag. No saving every single piece of schoolwork around here! 

About the digital portfolio, it’s basically folders in my google drive that I upload snapshots of work done, pdfs of written assignments, pictures of anything relevant like field trips or extracurriculars, something they made, or other achievements including competitions, certificates or trophies earned, etc organized by students name and year. At one point, when I finally get to it, I might consider keeping all their saved work for the year into one single pdf.

I also make a document showing at a glance all the other achievements for the year, including winning competitions, extracurriculars participated in, any coops, any other major events, as well as what they were most passionate about that year etc, so I can easily construct a transcript later if I need to. 

2) I next put away relevant paper from my Homeschool Curriculum Binder which is my master binder, in which I store printouts of the years curriculum as well as other lesson plan pages, checklists, poem lists, etc for the year. I shift them to a new folder labeled with that year, eg 2019-2020 Homeschool Curriculum. In this master binder, I also have things I reuse every year.eg: tips on teaching writing, writing prompts for emergencies, art study templates, any cheatsheets, and few other things I found useful to keep for reference. I leave these documents that I reuse every year.  So now I have my master binder ready for next year. Now I basically just have to print and add in the new curriculum, checklists and lesson plans after my final planning.

I also go through kids folders, and file away relevant papers.  

3) Once all the paper clutter from the year is gone, my next step is to declutter the schoolroom in general. I gather all lonely school items that have been misplaced, like broken crayons or ‘ownerless’ pencils lying around, as well as and put them in a box. Anything that’s unusable, I discard right away. Others I save to later refill throughout the year. At the beginning of the year, I give them new supplies, but then later replace with these saved items. I also search for other paper clutter and discard. These include ripped coloring pages, loose flashcards or puzzle pieces lying around, that most other  pieces are missing, stuff that need to be replaced (including coloring books, puzzles, flashcards etc), pages I overzealously printed but ended up not using and may not, etc.

Half written workbooks, I tear off unused pages and save all loose random worksheet pages to take out when needed. 

4) Next step, I go through most resources we have, and see if there are things I haven’t used at all, curriculum that don’t fit my teaching style, stuff that tend to make clutter all the time which kids don’t really care about anyway, and other such things we don’t end up using. I put them in a pile to sell or donate. I usually sell some of the curriculum books at our annual homeschool book sale, or donate.  

5) Next, I look at how many supplies we have, and make lists of things we will need to buy before the new school year (We usually purchase a little more than needed for the year, during back to school sales, for a safe margin, with so many kids). I keep the school supplies organized by type in the adjacent closet, so I can easily see when things start running out. 

By going through these steps, I am able to reclaim the space needed for the coming school year! 

I then proceed with lesson planning, which I will cover in the next post. So stay tuned!

 

 

Check out the other posts in this series, as well as previous relevant posts:

Getting Ready for the New School Year Series 1- Planning Curriculum

Getting Ready for the New School Year Series 2- Homeschool Room Clean out

Getting Ready for the New School Year Series 3- Lesson Planning

Getting Ready for the New School Year Series 4- Setting up a Homeschool Organization System

A look at the Different Homeschooling Methods and Philosophies of Education

Deciding if Homeschooling is Right for you and a Basic Roadmap for Getting Started