Workboxes are back... again

If any of you have been surfing around the homeschooling blogs over the past year or so, you'll know about the workbox buzz. It seems since it all hit the homeschool world, families have had their different approaches to the system, our family included.

Planner books don't get used in my house very much. I honestly get mad and want to throw the thing clear across the room. When first reading about workboxes, I loved the idea. I don't plan well. I didn't want to commit to buying the book so I did what others do, I modified.

It's laughable to think that I had the sq. footage to organize the system in it's pure form. Without spending money, I tried this rolling cart as seen above for Zazu and had my oldest use a file box to organize our day, both of which I already owned, which you may see in this post. I started strong but then I slowly got tired of the extra work the night before to load it up. Not just loading it up, but putting fresh stuff for my preschooler in there daily. I also had a little one on my hip and breast, and it was our second year homeschooling at that point. 

So I left it be for a while. 

Time went on and yet again I saw need to re-organize our routine so I then basically mimicked this with my boys.

It worked well for a time, until I again got tired of changing cards everyday and having my new very mobile daughter getting into EVERYTHING. I also tried laying them all out weekly, which meant I only had to rotate everything once a week.

Fast forward... Our home educating has changed over the last 3 years. I now am trying to use a more Charlotte Mason approach so we now have family work worked in and books, both of which  are a big part of our day. We use less worksheets and I've chosen more resources that are multi level which are used together in our family work time of the day. 


I now print off an online schedule for everyone. My oldest is now self motivated enough to follow the printed schedule with everything he needs,  either on his school shelf seen below (with the big red binder poking out) or at our cart. I really only need 4-5 drawers for Zazu and I see that carrying on through for the next year, until he  digs deeper into more grade/ability specific study.

Here's a portion of what Zazu did one week recently.

I had started Zazu on A Reason for Handwriting: Level A: Manuscript Student Workbook last month, but it doesn't seem to be a fit for him at this point. So this week it was back to more hands on for printing practice from Starfall. 

Go over to Homeschool Creations to see what Yolanthe and bunch of other mommies are doing with their pre-K and K's.