Welcome my Homeschooling friends, or considering Homeschooling friends! When we were thinking (and thinking and thinking) about homeschooling many moons ago, I used to love watching how other families homeschooled.

I would dive into videos about different ways families would organize their homeschools, what a ‘day in the life’ would look like, and pretty much anything I could get my hands on that might better equip me for the journey we were considering.

That was about 6 years ago now. At this point in our homeschooling journey, we are still swapping things up and making changes, but I feel we have found a flow and rhythm that works well for our family.

SO I decided to create a video and throw OUR homeschool day into the ring! This video shares with you the “File Folder” system we use to organize my children’s school work and the Unit Studies that we dive into as well.

Here it is:

If that video doesn’t want to play for you,  here it is from YouTube:

 

And if you are a reader more so than a watcher, here is a little blog post for you that covers what that video is all about.

We have been homeschooling now for just about 6 years. At this moment in time, my boys are 10 and 8 years old (in grade 5 and grade 3), and we also share our homeschool days with our little Norah, the Teaching Assistant, who is 2. 

Norah absolutely loves to help her brothers with their school work and insists on being involved in EVERY aspect of our days. While this can certainly be an added challenge, we are embracing it, knowing she is only going to be this little for a very short while. 

This year I have organized our school work differently than in years previous, and I am LOVING IT! This year we are using the “File Folder” system. I saw a similar idea to this on a YouTube video I watched back in my researching days, but I cannot find the original one I watched all those years ago to share with you. We use it a little differently anyways, so I will share exactly what we do.

In the summer, I took a Saturday and dove into the big task of organizing our file folders for the year. I took all of our worksheets, workbooks, etc that covered the topics of Math and Language Arts and ruthlessly went through them, ripping out pages I loved and using a major “Quality over Quantity” approach. I determined this year I wanted us to do minimal core skills work, while still giving my children the strongest of foundations. 

This was amazingly freeing! The idea of ripping workbooks apart and allowing myself to only select the pages I really wanted, omitting a bunch of stuff that was too repetitive or not valuable. 

A 2023 update for you – I have now created my own curriculum to save you from this step! My curriculum focuses completely on quality over quantity and allows you to complete your full grade in ONE page of literacy and ONE page of math per day! Grades 1-3 are currently available right here!

I then organized all of these worksheets into 36 file folders, as I wanted us to have a 36-week homeschool year. As I did this, I again became ruthless, ensuring there was only a minimal amount – the best of the best – in each file folder. I wanted my children to be able to accomplish this “file folder” work in 30 minutes – 1 hour per day.

Now that I had the 36 file folders for each of my boys labelled weeks 1 -36, they can be completely independent and learn all about time management. I support my 8-year-old with this skill, but my 10-year-old is on his own, learning as he goes. Some days, my 10-year-old decides he is not going to do his file folder work, saving it to do double the next day – and then the ‘next day’ he may very well regret this decision!

I love how this organization system gives my children control over their learning and how it offers such a minimal approach to worksheet/workbook learning while still giving my children a foundation in core skills.

Once our file folder work is done for the day, we typically head outside, or the kids scamper off to play LEGO or something until lunchtime.

After lunch, we have our daily quiet time/independent time where my boys typically read. 

And in the afternoon we dive into our Unit Studies! Unit studies have been complete game-changers for us. We all gather together to learn together. It is my favourite part of our day. 

If you’re curious whether my unit studies would be a good fit for your family, grab my FREE Sample Pack and take a peek inside three of my Unit Studies! You can also see the entire collection of Unit Studies available in my shop right here.

Well, what do you think? That about sums us up for this year. Of course we also have our weekly co-op, weekly music lessons, and nature school thrown into the mix. I believe it will be just the right mix of home/social. We shall see!

I would love to hear what your homeschool day is like! Let me know in a comment below,

Thank you so much for reading, sweet friend!

xo
Sarah