You’ll probably soon notice that I use a lot of 3-ring binders in my home. Each of my children has his or her own binder — even the little ones, who would feel very left out without one!
So let’s take a peek inside my daughter Kaitlyn’s school notebooks.
Inside the Front Cover
As soon as you open her assignment notebook, you’ll see a lot of odds and ends and daily junk in the inside pocket. (We need to work on that…)
- Scrap paper.
- Stickers.
- Maps that should have been filed away.
- Ideas for writing assignments.
- Doodling…
The first few pages of the notebook are the pages they look at every day, so we’ve placed them inside plastic sheet protectors.
The front sheet of Kaitlyn’s noteboook from 8th grade tells her that each day, she needs to work on:
- Copywork
- Math
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Science
- Writing
- Bible Reading
- Literature
- Chapter Book
- Piano Practice
- Volunteer Work
- Study Hebrew Vocabulary
(She has pasted horse pictures all over this sheet.)
Behind the Tabbed Dividers
Next are all the tabbed divider sections that help her remember things.
- Divider 1: Science
- Divider 2: Bible Reading Schedule
- Divider 3: Reading Log
- Divider 4: Grammar
- Divider 5: Writing (lots of notebook paper here)
- Divider 6: Hebrew
- Divider 7: Vocabulary
- Divider 8: Blank Paper and Girl Stuff
We also have many Subject Notebooks on our shelf — notebooks for Bible Time, History, Science, you name it. We usually put all our pages in the same notebook, separating students by tabbed dividers. Sometimes we don’t separate them at all, because it’s fun to compare a 2nd-grader’s thoughts with an 11th-grader’s thoughts.
Finally, each child has a plastic crate in which they store books, notebooks, and school supplies. We’re working to reduce the amount of clutter in those.
I’d love to hear how you keep your children organized for school.
~Anne
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I noticed math, spelling and liturature weren’t represented with their own dividers even though they are subjects she has to do. Can you explain? Also, do you put all this year’s assignments in their one notebook, or is it for just that week’s work…? Thx?
Yes! I think part of the problem is that this is an older post, and back a few years ago, we didn’t have any worksheets for those subjects. My daughter wrote all of her assignments for those subjects into a composition notebook. Today, we have worksheets for everyone to print, so YES, my children now have dividers for those subjects.
Here is a newer post that shows another way to do the binders, although the principle is the same:
https://homeschoolingtorah.com/quick-start/
As for putting all of this year’s assignments into one binder — no, it would never fit. In our home, we print every week. I do all the printing on Sunday morning over a cup of coffee. When our binders get full, we remove the previous weeks’ worksheets and store them in a box in our basement. That’s just how we’ve chosen to do it, because a binder for every subject gets heavy and hard to carry. Our kids have to store their school binders in their rooms in the house where we currently live, so it’s just easier to do one week at a time. (Small house!) But if I had a dedicated school room and plenty of storage space, I might try to do one binder for every subject. That could potentially be easier.
I hope this helps! 🙂