Practical Homeschooling
Any homeschooling family knows that the process of learning takes up most of your time. Getting things organized may the key to success for some families. We've compiled tips and ideas to make your homeschooling practical and a good fit into the rest of your life. As a bonus, we take a look at some of the ways you can save money while learning together as a family.
Organizing Tips
An organized home may seem impossible when you have kids around all day long, but it can be done. Here are tips and ideas that will help your household run smoothly.
Avoiding Burnout
Everyone faces it at one time or another. Read through these tips for inspiration and ideas to combat homeschooling burnout, both for parents and children.
Money Savers
It is a fact that homeschooling will cost you some money. But there are ways to keep costs down. In fact, you can homeschool quite inexpensively and how much you spend is really up to you. Browse through these resources, tips, and ideas to help you save some money.
Housekeeping
Doing the household chores can seem like a burden when you have so much else going on. There are some strategies to help make this burden lighter. Read through these ideas and tips on keeping your home clean and how to get the whole family involved.
In The Kitchen
What's for dinner? That is the age-old question every mother has faced, day after day. Browse through these menu planning ideas, recipes, and strategies for getting food on your table without all the hassle.
Chores
With children learning and playing (and, let's face it--making messes) all day long, chores become an inevitable hurdle for the homeschooling family. Here you'll find everything from printable chore charts to chore organizers, along with helpful ideas on how to get kids to do their chores and how to divvy them up to make it fair for all.
Lesson Planning
Don't know what to teach today or how to get everything done? Explore these resources for planning your lessons and get ideas on how to help your homeschool day run smoothly.
Record Keeping
Record keeping can be a great way for you to see how you and your children are progressing, as well as a means to meet state requirements for reporting and administration of your homeschool.
Calendars
You can use calendars to keep track of activites, plan your lessons, keep your records, and organize your life.
What's Popular
The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook
If you are thinking about homeschooling, or are struggling with a educational homeschooling curriculum that is difficult to use, let Dr. Ray and Dorothy Moore show you how to make homeschooling an easy-to-live-with family adventure in learning. This low-stress, low-cost program shows you how to build a curriculum around your child's needs and interests - and around a realistic family schedule. Instead of a cut-and-dried approach, you'll discover the freedom of a flexible program that encourages ...
Clutter Side Effects: How the State of Your Home Affects Your Life
Each area of your home has a symbolic meaning with which you resonate on a subconscious level. Clutter and untidiness within each of these areas causes constriction and inertia in the corresponding aspects of your life.
The Art of Organizing Your Space
The furniture in your room is situated just right, yet it's cluttered with lots of paper, items taken from other parts of the house, too many knick-knacks, and trash particles that didn't quite make it to the trashcan. Shouldn't we be asking ourselves, "What's wrong with this picture?" Maybe you already know the answer. But then, why hasn't anything been done about it yet? Don't try to answer that. There's an art to approaching the task of getting organized.
Don't Waste Your Time Homeschooling: 72 Things I Wish I'd Known
Traci Matt, a veteran homeschool mom helps you make the most of your homeschooling efforts. She takes a look back at 20 years of successes and challenges, offering tested strategies to assist you on your home education journey. This book will help you learn ways to keep a peaceful home, stay out of the isolation trap, practice self-care, learn how to live with teens, and respond to the questions of others.
Jo-Ann Stores
Register online to receive a Teacher Discount Card. You will receive 10% off your total purchase all year long and are added to their Preferred Customer mail list for additional special savings. They are asking that all homeschoolers requesting these cards be affiliated with PEAH (Parents Educating at Home). PEAH requires you to fill out a form to get a code to use to sign up for this discount. You may choose not to jump through this additional hoop, or it may be worth it to you if you intend to...
Home School Organizer
A binder system with logs and forms that can be customized to suit your family's needs. This system can be used for multiple children and offers a simple way to meet any applicable state record keeping requirements.
Time Management Tips for Homeschool Families
Time. It's a homeschool family's most precious resource--and the claims on a homeschooler's time are many and vociferous. Time management is a homeschool parent's most pressing challenge. Includes tips on using a planner and how to get the most out of scheduling.
Affording the Large Family Homeschool
For any family seeking a private Christian education in the home, money quickly becomes an issue. While programs like K12 and other public-school umbrellas exist, they do not offer the freedom of choice so many homeschoolers are looking for. Nor do they offer a Christian education. Most homeschooling families opt to buy their own curriculum so they can truly be in charge of their child’s education. When a homeschooling family has many children, curriculum buying becomes an exercise in crea...
Singing the Burnout Blues
A homeschooling mom shares her struggles with burnout and explains some coping strategies that have worked for her.
Meal Planning Made Easy
It's no fun trying to decide what to make for dinner every night. Planning your meals ahead of time often saves you time as well as money. There are many different ways to plan your meals. How you plan yours depends on how much time you want to spend now to save yourself time later.
Menus 4 Moms
Are you panicking at 4:00 pm because you didn't realize it was so late and no dinner is planned? Let Menus 4 Moms help plan your dinner! Every week, Menus 4 Moms posts a dinner menu including recipes and grocery list for Monday through Friday, freeing your planning time. Menus 4 Moms is a weekly email with a link to free menus and recipes for dinner and is based on the Busy Cooks Pyramid.
The Big Clean Up
Stacy DeBroff shares 15 favorite get-organized secrets, allowing you to declutter with ease.
Home Schooling from Scratch : Simple Living, Super Learning
Parents learn what they really need, how to find or create materials and opportunities for less money, and how to organize their household for economical, happy learning.
How Do I Keep Organized?
Tips for using calendars, binders, notebooks, and a weekly assignment record to organize your homeschool. Although this article is specific to one curriculum, there are some useful general tips.
Inexpensive Educational Supplies
How much are supplies for unschooling? It ranges somewhere between nothing and everything--the whole budget. Once a family starts to consider everything educational, even groceries and cleaning supplies are educational. For beginners, though, part of the trick is working on the definition of "educational."
Resources
The Organizing Sourcebook : Nine Strategies for Simplifying Your Life

The nine habits of highly organized people

Organizing consultant Kathy Waddill demonstrates how the simple act of being organized can improve your quality of life. In The Organizing Sourcebook, she presents nine organizing principles that can easily be applied to any situation, activity, or environment. The book gives you the tools for managing time; decreasing stress; and dealing with cultural, personal, and emotional change. Case histories illustrate how each strategy solved a specific problem.

Unclutter Your Home: 7 Simple Steps, 700 Tips & Ideas (Simplicity Series)
Hundreds of practical ideas for sorting, evaluating, and getting rid of all those material items that get in the way of a simplified lifestyle.
Conquering Chronic Disorganization
The real-life stories of chronically disorganized people and the ground breaking, easy-to-learn organizing methods used to end their chronic disorganization in the area of residential clutter, office organizing, paper management, storage, and time management. Conquerings pages includes an extensive index, user-friendly summaries, quick tips, helpful photographs, and a resource section of products and organizations.
The Well-Ordered Home: Organizing Techniques for Inviting Serenity into Your Life
Organizing the home is one of those desirable and beneficial activities that remain elusive for many. This practical guide explains the many benefits - physical, emotional, and spiritual - of an organized home and shows how to attain them. Breaking down the process into 50 steps, the author uses her own experiences as a psychologist and professional home organizer to help readers clear away not only the physical clutter but the psychological blocks that encourage it and hinder organization. She tells where to start, encourages small steps, and explores the psychology of organizing. Next she addresses fundamental principles, including keeping tools where they will be used and making the most of active storage space. Finally, she shows how to get rid of excess stuff, including how to attack those never-ending piles and junk drawers, and stem the inflow of junk into the home. These easy exercises, tips, and stories will truly help readers organize their homes for efficiency, peacefulness, and well-being.
Help for the Harried Homeschooler : A Practical Guide to Balancing Your Child's Education with the Rest of Your Life
Homeschooling moms and dads can be overwhelmed by the demands on their time. Between their children’s educational needs; their roles as spouse, parent, and more; and their own individual desires and goals, these mothers and fathers struggle to accomplish all that must be done. In Help for the Harried Homeschooler, experienced homeschooler, author, and mother of four Christine Field offers sound advice for parents who want not only to achieve homeschooling success but also to reach a balance in their lives.
Organizing Plain and Simple: A Ready Reference Guide With Hundreds Of Solutions to Your Everyday Clutter Challenges
Desk drowning in papers? No room for the car in the garage? Santa still sitting on the roof in May? A less-is-more philosophy is great, but we all still have way too much stuff. The home office swallows up whole rooms, as does the family computer station. Then there's the home gym, the TV room, and the playroom, not to mention our collections - books, CDs, toys. Time management experts agree that when the minor things that take up space in the mind are eliminated, there is room to think about the big things. The same goes for the home. The visual clarity that comes from de-cluttering rooms, finances, and time promotes mental clarity, peacefulness, and contemplation. When everything is organized, it is easier to enjoy the meaningful things in life.

Organizing Plain & Simple is like a course from an expert teacher, grounded in the fundamentals and enriched with philosophy, tips, anecdotes, illustrations - everything necessary to make home and life run more smoothly. Donna Smallin takes a personalized, nonjudgemental approach to explaining how to assess each individual's situation and suggesting where to start organizing - room by room - and then covers how to stay organized. Then she offers advice on organizing time and finances, as well as organizing for the seasons and for special events - the birth of a baby, combining households, a move, kids going off to college, successful downsizing. Smallin presents a broad range of innovative solutions in the running feature "One Challenge, Three Solutions" that includes tips for solving classic organizational issues from a wide range of professional organizers.

Miserly Moms: Living on One Income in a Two-Income Economy
Save Thousands of Dollars a Year

Jonni McCoy and her family are proof that you live on one income. The McCoys made a successful transition from two incomes to one while living in one of the most expensive parts of America: the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her Miserly Guidelines will help you save thousands of dollars a year on everything from groceries to electricity to insurance and household cleaners—as well as reveal the hidden costs of holding a job and common money wasters. Her practical, proven cost-saving techniques, strategies, tips, and recipes will help you live frugally without feeling deprived.

Home Organizing Workbook: Clearing Your Clutter, Step-By-Step
Failing the Mary Poppins' snap-the-fingers approach to cleaning, here's the next best thing: an utterly practical handbook that offers lasting results for anyone looking to banish clutter from every room in the house. Home organizer par excellence Meryl Starr offers up her hardworking organizing solutions in The Home Organizing Workbook, a straightforward guide to getting organized. The room chapters begin with targeted questionnaires that help the reader identify specific organizational problems, followed by hundreds of hardworking solutions and strategic maintenance tips. Those itching to get started can dive right in with step-by-step organizing projects ranging from quick-and-easy weeknight jobs, like overhauling the spice cabinet, to more intensive endeavors such as reorganizing the bedroom closet. Accessory lists at the end of each chapter feature dozens of the best products available, from lazy susans to shelf dividers, and explain exactly how they can be used to optimum effect in each room, while the extensive resource list shows where to get them. It's a package as tidy as its solutions: concealed Wire-O lay-flat binding, tabbed chapters to take readers straight to their problem area du jour, and full-color, solution-oriented photographs sure to inspire action. Ready to clear that clutter and keep it that way? The Home Organizing Workbook is the ultimate guide to preserving open spaces.
Educational Travel on a Shoestring : Frugal Family Fun and Learning Away from Home
Educational Travel on a Shoestring shows parents how they can help their children learn–and have a blast–while traveling. From researching destinations to sharing activities that both teach and entertain, this priceless guide offers practical information for parents who want to have more fun with their kids, build closer family ties, and enjoy richer educational experiences–all without spending a fortune.
Home Schooling from Scratch : Simple Living, Super Learning
Parents learn what they really need, how to find or create materials and opportunities for less money, and how to organize their household for economical, happy learning.
Featured Resources

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Minds More Awake: The Vison of Charlotte Mason
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Visual Brainstorms
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Pass Your New York DMV Test Guaranteed! 50 Real Test Questions! New York DMV Practice Test Questions
This book is written by a former DMV classroom instructor. He shares the 50 most common questions and answers to the New York DMV written test. A great guide to help your teen pass the DMV test on their first try.
Why We Homeschool
It is a common misconception that most parents homeschool due to bullies, school shootings, or bad teaching content. While these things are important, there is a higher purpose for choosing to home education your children. Even if all those things we...
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