Today I’m going to show you how to set up a simple homeschool binder for your student (or students.) Whether or not you live in a state where extensive record keeping is required, I highly recommend keeping records of your kids’ work.
For older students, you’re going to need the work your student completed to create a transcript. And for younger students, it’s a great paper trail to reference what they’ve learned (and how far you’ve come!) Also, you never know if you’re going to move out of state or if your state will suddenly adopt new standards. Better safe than sorry.
Enter the simplest, most efficient notebook in the world. Seriously. I’ve tried a few different methods in my homeschool journey–filing my kid’s work, adding everything to a notebook once a week, keeping the workbooks–and this one is by far my favorite.
So, let’s do this! All you will need to start is a 4-inch binder (this is the one we use), tab dividers for each subject (these are my favs because I like the larger tabs), and the curriculum and/or workbooks you are going to use. It’ll also greatly help to sit down beforehand and figure out your schedule for the year.
Schedule sidenote: you might be cringing (or celebrating) at the idea of a schedule, but believe me, having a roadmap as to what you want to accomplish and in what order will help you and your kiddo(s) to not go crazy. Better yet, as your kid matures, they can just go ahead and do the next thing on the list. Win-win.
With your schedule in hand, make tabs for each subject, and put them in dividers and then into the notebook. This will make your notebook a portable schedule for your kiddo.
Now is the fun part! You’ll need to pull out a week’s worth of work for each tab. It might sound daunting, but after your first week or so, this step will just take you a few minutes. Older kids can do this themselves.
Let’s say you are doing math five times a week. Look in your teacher’s manual or whatever you’re using as a guide and find which pages out of the workbook you’ll need. Tear them out, hole punch them (if needed), and add them behind “Math” in the notebook. If you only do Vocabulary three times a week, you’ll only put three days of work behind that tab.
Once you’re finished with the first week, you won’t have to “refill” the notebook until the following Friday. I add the next week’s pages as we go through each subject on Friday. For example, my kiddo finishes up Math and moves on to Reading. While she’s reading, I pull out the Math workbook, tear out the pages, hole punch, and place them in the notebook. Easy peasy.
At the end of the year, this binder will hold all of her work and writing samples for the year. Yes! And if we find there is way more work than I realized, we’ll divide the notebook and let it spill over to another binder, no worries.
Having a simple homeschool binder setup like this means we literally pull it off the shelf and start our school day. No juggling 8 million books anymore. Yes, if you’re wondering, we still use textbooks, but workbooks and all writing assignments are completed in the notebook.
Hope you have a wonderful {and creative} day!
