I was chatting on a workboxes homeschooling group, having one of those conversations where a mom asks if we all think she may be overloading her exasperated kids with “too much work” (the answer is invariably “yes” in these conversations, in case you’re curious). A lot of times, I find those conversations very exhausting, because they’re about the mom wanting strategies to be able to force her kid to do a lot more boring, tedious stuff, and then doing a lot of flailing because no one gives her any and instead tells her to relax and consider chucking, like, everything. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn’t like that, but had been initiated by a very well-meaning and thoughtful mom whose 7yo was getting frustrated despite the mom’s very best efforts, and she was looking to make the day more enjoyable for the family, a good goal to have imho . During the conversation, she said their school day was lasting over 6 hours, and I said:

Just so you can see a different perspective: That’s over an hour longer than my son’s average workbox day – and he’s in the SIXTH GRADE, and he studies 2 foreign languages, practices 2 musical instruments, reads poetry, Shakespeare, Hymns, logic, Bible devotional, art history, music theory, medieval history, united states geography, literature and astronomy.

Another mom then asked me some questions about how it’s possible to organize my son’s time with the boxes (we don’t call them workboxes, just boxes) in such a way that it takes “so little time.” I think four hours is a lot of time! I thought I would repost my detailed response here. Italics were her questions, the rest is my response. It’s been a good talk, with the other mom asking a lot of good questions that made me think a lot and helped me clarify my own values some more, so hopefully this is helpful to someone. This is an ongoing dialogue, so there will be follow-ups with people’s questions in future posts, but feel free to ask your own! (Some of you longtime readers may notice we’ve changed a lot since starting this school year and are no longer using Ambleside Online’s recommendations. My son is still really interested in the Middle Ages, though, so he asked me to buy a few of the WinterPromise resources to learn more about the Middle Ages. More on this change at a later date!) A few of my answers have been proofread and/or expanded upon from the conversation where it was necessary for greater clarity.

My 6th grader does three subjects at a co-op (one is no homework), plus French, flute, history, and science at home, and it’s really hard for me to schedule all her subjects. Would you mind sharing a sample weekly schedule?

I don’t mind at all

The last few months, we have settled into a comfortable, flexible routine, where we get a much earlier start in the day than we used to. But we are both early morning lallygaggers and I work nights, so we get started later than most families. Typically my son starts his boxes between 10AM and 11AM, we break half an hour for lunch somewhere in there, and we’re done with the boxes by 2:30 or 3:30, depending on what we are doing. We then go out and do errands, or go to the park for a playdate, or other outings or sometimes we just chill out and goof off on the Internet, watch TV, play video games, build robots, or whatever else he’ll feel like doing. I try to schedule all doctor’s appointments for this time, too.

I will say that we don’t do any co-ops (my kid hates them) and I try to keep our field trip type outings for the weekend. We don’t do more than 2 field trips with our local homeschooling groups per month and it’s ONLY if my son seems excited about it, for example, the trip to see a Norman Rockwell exhibit next month. We have a lot of cool weekend and night time outings, but I’m a single mom and have to work, and there are only so many hours in the day! He has a park date weekly and a youth group twice a week at night, and sometimes a playdate with a friend, and that’s about it during the weekdays.

These are things which are not in the boxes, that he either does of his own free will and doesn’t want me to organize for him, or we do together as a family every day:

• Computer programming/Internet surfing/ video game design
• TV. We both like TV a lot and I won’t apologize for that. I’ve written several posts about why I love it and think it’s awesome. I don’t restrict TV in any way, but I do watch things with Shorty and talk about things we watch. Shorty is currently really into marathons of Everybody Hates Chris reruns
• Afternoon walk, weather permitting, approx a mile and a half a day, for exercise and fresh air and chatting and sometimes Shorty likes to take our digital camera and take pictures of our walks and post them on his Facebook (he’s got a great eye for photography!!);
• Instrument practice (guitar and piano) 10-15 min each, though he sometimes will spend hours in the afternoon practicing on his own;
• Morning Bible devotionals and daily Bible reading, which Shorty has requested we do before anything else;
• Bedtime literature. He says he’s too old to call it a bedtime story. *g* Sometimes he reads it out loud, sometimes I do, sometimes we switch off. Currently reading The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell, in concurrence with our study of the middle ages. It’s pretty awesome!!

These are the boxes we do daily:

• Latin, Shorty’s pet subject #1 – Getting Started With Latin has turned out to be a big hit;
• Math – typically two worksheets;
• Wordly Wise vocabulary, Book 5 – pet subject #2;
• Some kind of history reading. We have many books on the Middle Ages,  so sometimes we have more than one history reading – reading from the “spine” or main book (currently The Kingfisher’s Atlas of the Medieval World) and then a second book about the subject, usually very brief on each count. We’re talking no more than 2-3 pages, unless he wants to keep reading.
• Geography/ map drawing, pet subject #3.
• Poetry – we just read 1 poem a day from a Walter de la Mare poem book. We don’t discuss it too much or analyze it. We just read it for fun.

These are the boxes we do 2-3 times per week, as our schedule and his mood permits:

• Spanish – We are native speakers, and live in Little Havana, so our focus is vocabulary expansion so that Shorty can communicate with locals more easily;
• Astronomy: short reading, plus occasional notebooking/games – that would be a 2nd box;
• Some kind of history-related project, lapbook or activity – currently we are alternating between a project from The Days of Knights and Dames and lapbooking about knights and castles;
• Christian studies – we did a wonderful Advent study during Christmas that Shorty absolutely fell in love with, and he’s been reading A Little Pilgrim’s Progress;
• Tangrams, which my kid loves, but not too often or he gets tired of them!

These are the subjects we do once per week:

• Nature walks with nature studies,
• Guitar lesson;
• Piano lesson;
• Logic – having great fun with The Fallacy Detective;
• Hymn study with the book and CD, Then Sings My Soul;
• Shakespeare – usually a couple of pages from a “Tales from Shakespeare” book;
• Biography. Currently Diane Stanley’s Joan of Arc. Shorty really loves and gets into biographies and we are discussing organizing a study of inventors and industrial-revolution people (his other favorite historical era) when he finishes his current stuff;
• Grammar – one weekly exercise from Simply Grammar by Karen Andreola for my little budding wordsmith;
• Reading out loud from the McGuffey 3rd Eclectic Reader – he has great dramatic flair

These are the things we only do every other week:

• Juggling, a popular medieval pastime which he’s always wanted to learn anyway;
• Art History OR Composer studies – We alternate between the two. One week we do one, the other week, we do the other. Shorty really gets excited about these, though, so I’m looking to see about doing this more often. Currenttly we are listening to a lot of Edvard Grieg and Sibelius, and leafing through my huge Norman Rockwell book, whose realism in illustration Shorty admires and envies. Fortunately, there is a traveling exhibit of his work right in town!

I’d love to see how you approach scheduling so many topics.

I have my little weekly workbox grid that I made. Because I like to plan for the whole year vs. little-by-little planning, even if I inevitably end up changing a million things as we go along, I printed out 36 of those, one for each week of the “school year,” which is all I have to keep track of for record-keeping purposes, though we do cool stuff almost every day all year long. I put subject dividers between each 12 - twelve weeks in a term, which our private umbrella school requires us to track. 180 days.

I am not married to this schedule in any way.  It is a list of possibilities for the day and nothing more.

I then take each resource and divide it up. If it’s a book, I divide its pages by 180, if it’s something we want to take all year to do. For example, the Latin curriculum he wanted has only 120 lessons. So we figured out that he needs to do about 3-4 lessons per week to finish it by the end of the year. So I go through the 36 weeks and put “Latin lesson #whatever” 3 or 4 times per week all year, until I get to 120. If it’s a shorter book, for example, we are reading the book Medieval Medicine and the Plague which has only 12 chapters, each about 2 pages long, I put it once per week for one term. Or I could put it once every 3 weeks all year, or whatever else had suited us.

NOTE: You do NOT have to plan things out for a whole year. You can divide the resource this way above, or you can plan one or two weeks ahead and not pre-determine how much you’re going to do. Then you’d just write “Legos” or “art/craft” or “Read such and such book.”

I do not feel the need to tell my son what to do all day long. My son has explicitly asked for help organizing his time and attention between his many interests, so I divide it up for him, but of course, if he wants to work ahead or postpone something one day, we do.

Sometimes I have a set amount to cover in a set amount of time. For The King’s Fifth, the novel we are reading right now, which has 31 chapters, I did not want to take months to read it, because we both lose interest and start to find it tedious when that happens, so I decided we’d read one chapter per day, which was 6 weeks if we read one chapter on a weekend. So I put in the “notes” section of my planner for week 1: “The King’s Fifth, Ch 1-5″. And then I put a checkmark as we read them, so I can at least tell where we are if I lose the bookmark. LOL!

FIRST, I do this with what he wants do every day. I fill in all the workboxes all year for those – labor intensive up-front, but saves me tons of time over the year.

THEN, I do this with the things he only wants do a few times a week.

FINALLY I plug in the ones he only does once a week or every other week. I just stick them wherever there’s an empty box!

I try to leave at least one empty box per day for spontaneous projects or for things he didn’t get to the day before or whatever. But it’s not necessary because the stuff we’re doing IS fun for him. If it’s not something he’s enjoying, I chuck it and we try something else or drop it. We have very few “schooly” things in there. I am constantly introducing new and interesting things, and I try to pay very close attention to what my son responds well to and what he doesn’t. I feel the materials should serve the child, not vice versa. I don’t understand why I see so many moms try a curriculum, notice it tanks with the kid, and conclude there’s something wrong with the KID! And then post, “How can I make my kid want to do this thing he hates that I think he should do anyway?” To me this is a backwards approach to education.

I’m guessing you don’t do everything, every day, but how do you decide what you don’t really need to do on a daily basis when so many things like music and foreign language need constant practice?

Some of it, as you saw above, decides itself. It is very obvious that Simply Grammar, with its 39 in-depth lessons, cannot be done every day and fits better as a weekly visitation. A lot of my notions, I got from Charlotte Mason, who really believed in child-gentle interest-whetting vs. a proscribed set of information delivered in a prescribed manner. This is also why we study hymns and Shakespeare, and only once a week. That was her recommendation and we tried it and it seems to work for Shorty. The rest, I take my cue from my son. I don’t think anyone NEEDS to do geography five times a week (or ever, really), but since my kid is endlessly fascinated by maps and state trivia, and thinks it’s great fun, we do.

Also, *I* don’t decide this. We decide it together. If he wanted to read Shakespeare every day, we would. And we only read it once a week because he asks me to read it. I think for him it’s like a little radio play. LOL, as in, ”This week on SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMATIC SOAP OPERA…”

And I realize this goes against conventional wisdom, but I don’t think a foreign language needs daily practice to master, and music practice is something my son is expected to do on his own. We are both musicians, so this isn’t really something he needs a reminder about; it’s just his great passion that he’s currently pursuing. We listen to, talk about and play music all day. I don’t think a child should be forced to play an instrument if s/he doesn’t want to. If s/he wants to play one, I would just be very frank about what’s required. “People who don’t practice the piano every day stink at piano. If you do practice every day, in a very short amount of time, you will be totally awesome at it. It’s up to you what you wanna be!” My son knows I’m honest and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to music, so I only had to tell him this once!

I think when a child trusts you to respect his comfort zones, they trust your opinions a lot more, instead of finding them suspect and wondering if you’re trying to con him into doing something you think he should be doing, whether he hates it or not.

Do you do homework after dinner or some other trick to be done for the afternoon more quickly?

Nooooo. We do no homework. We are anti-homework! LOL! Once the boxes are done, either just before or just after lunch, his time is totally unscheduled, except that it is convenient for both of us if he showers while I’m making dinner. Otherwise, he does whatever he wants with his time. Basically, the workboxes are just a way for me to help him structure his time. He finds this helpful and encouraging. I am by nature a very UNSTRUCTURED person with a good internal clock, but he’s the opposite, he likes to plot out every minute of his time and has asked me to help him do this, so while it’s more controlling of his time than I would prefer, I need to acknowledge that his preferences are  not my preferences and I use the workboxes to help him in this way.

My son has a large workspace he likes very much because it is a very business-y roll top desk that he says “makes him feel like an executive.” LOL.  I sit next to him and let him do his thing while I work on mylaptop, unless he needs me for something, but if I see he’s taking forever on one box, I will use humor to check in with him (“EARTH TO ELI, DO YOU COPY?!” ) Sometimes this is enough to get him back on task. Sometimes he’ll then say he’s struggling and needs help. Sometimes he’ll say “Mom, I reeeeeeeally don’t feel like doing this today” and that is okay because I also am not always in the mood to do something every day. The homeschool police will not arrest us if we chuck a worksheet… or a whole workbook!

Obviously I’m a very laidback parent/ person/ homeschooler. When I say my son’s time is unscheduled except for the boxes, I mean it is totally unscheduled. I put no limits on any activity. He is allowed to watch TV, play video games, listen to music, chat with his friends/grandma on Facebook, or WHATEVER as much as he wants. I am right there actively engaging him in what he does, of course, but I am very much about not controlling every waking minute of a kid’s life. I think this is why workboxing and homeschooling is so low-stress for me and my kid. We just do whatever makes us happy, and don’t do whatever doesn’t. So far, so good!

People frequently ask me how it is I get everything done. I am sometimes taken aback by this question because I have such a long to-do list every day that rarely gets finished. Time management is a skill that takes time, practice and refinement to really find what works for you, but it is also the case that I look at the term “single parent homeschooling” as a holistic lifestyle and “job” – I am single, meaning I need to figure out how to do things by myself such as earn a living and run a household; I am a parent, which is a whole other set of responsibilities with child rearing; and i am a homeschooling mother, which means I am primarily responsible for my child’s education.

How to mesh these three components into a cohesive whole has been an ongoing quest for me, so I’ll share a few perspectives that have helped me, in the hopes that it helps and encourages someone else.

1. I Am Single.

I must do or oversee everything in my house or it does not get done. This includes homemaking and breadwinning, and if I am not careful, I can burn myself out to the point of illness. This isn’t just a cautionary tale – it is a fact and has happened to me more than once.

I have been working from home since my son was an infant. I would like to say that this is less challenging now that Shorty can entertain himself for longer periods by himself and has studies occupying a lot of his time, but it’s not any easier, it’s just different. As an infant he needed constant attention in basic needs; as a preteen, and an only child, he wants to chatter with me all day long about everything, and wants to share every new discovery that pops into his head with me. This is wonderful and I do not want to discourage this, and do not want him to get too lonely, but it doesn’t leave for any more free time for me than before.

What has helped me with being the sole breadwinner and the sole manager of the home has been to learn to delegate and to help my son to be as independent and self-possessed as possible for him. He cleans his room fairly well; he makes his bed; he dusts his own space; he chooses and gathers his own clothes each week (I made this craft to help him organize his clothes each week – they did not come out as pretty but he loves them anyway) and so on. He can even make a few simple meals, such as a chef salad, PBJ and frozen pizza. He also helps with the laundry (we do not have one in our building and have to go to the laundromat) and helps with that, as well. I still do all the heavy lifting, organizing and cleaning, but it helps that he does a lot on his own, too.

This isn’t just for my convenience. These are valuable life skills. Plenty of practice is helpful, and these are habit training methods that will benefit him in the long term and help relieve the burden of me having to do EVERYTHING for him.

Parents, if you are single and you homeschool, you CANNOT do everything yourself. There are only so many hours in the day and there is only so much of you to go around. You must learn to delegate household duties somehow. You DO NOT need to be SuperWoman/Man; neither do you need to radically overhaul your household overnight to achieve this. Baby steps are better than nothing!

Here are some links you may find useful in helping to develop good habits in your kids.

• Comprehensive list of age-appropriate chores
• Cute printable chore chart for kids – laminate it at OfficeMax (or wherever), hang it on your fridge, and use a dry-erase marker for week to week chore management for the whole family!
• Habit training – an incredible e-Book by Charlotte Mason that will revolutionize the way you see habit formation as a parent.

Keeping your kids accountable is one thing, but you also need to keep YOURSELF accountable and find a way to not overfocus and to learn to manage your own time. Here are some links that may help you to that end, as well!

• LifeHacker – a blog about how to get more out of your time.
• Motivated Moms – a printable chore planning system to help you have a clean and organized home and still have time for yourself
• FlyLady – a personal time-management and household organization system used by millions

If you are able to seek outside help, such as an older homeschooled student, fellow mom or church friend, who is both responsible enough and willing to help with household responsibilities or anything else you may need, please do seek it. Some people feel like getting outside help is a failure on their part somehow, but the real failure is not being able to recognize where you cannot meet a need in your home all by yourself and failing to seek a way to meet it some other way.

I am single, but I am not the only person on this planet, and cannot and should not do everything alone.

2. I Am a Parent.
Running my own business and keeping up with all my duties, I have occasionally not made as much time to be an active parent as I should be, content that my son’s life was productively filled with playdates, schoolwork, activities and time spent with relatives. But children above all want time with their mom and/or dad, and this is especially true of children of single parents. Single parents work very hard, so hard that sometimes all they do is work.

This is a mistake. All children need to be actively engaged by interested adults in their lives. They need to know that they are not alone in their world while being given safe spaces to learn decision-making. As a child, I was materially indulged very much by well-meaning family that raised me but was not interested in my interests or passions; I now see where it left me feeling like I didn’t have anyone to turn to in times of crisis, even though I did in fact have those people. I had not been taught to look to anyone’s counsel but my own. Children need active parents in their lives making safe spaces for them to make mistakes, not careen out of control at will.

Parents, no matter how tired you are, no matter how stressed you are with other matters, find a consistent way of structuring your home so that your child knows his home environment is safe and relatively predictable. Make family traditions for every ridiculous holiday you can think of (we love our yearly viewing of 1776 the musical on July 4, for example). Talk often. Have a family game night, if only once a month. Take an interest in their video games or whatever else catches their fancy. Go on nature walks. Tell them about your own childhood as you see fit. Talk about how your values compare to what you see in a movie you’re watching. toss a ball for 5 minutes in your backyard or at the park (even if you stink at it, like I do).

I say these things not because I’m awesome at integrating these ideas and am looking down on others who don’t – but because I personally often forget that children want your time more than anything else you could provide for them. Single parents are sometimes so overwhelmed by meeting their immediate and more mundane responsibilities that active participation with your kids takes a back burner. It shouldn’t. It can’t.

I suggest setting aside at least one day a week where you spend time having utterly frivolous fun as a family. For us that day is usually Sunday. We go to church and Bible study, then we go out to the beach, or rent a movie and have a movie night, or invite the grandparents over to play board games, or what have you. My son is never happier than when I sit down to play a video game with him, even if I’m absolutely terrible at them.

3. I Am a Homeschooler.
The principles that apply above also apply to homeschooling as a single parent.

You must learn to delegate if necessary, either through a co-op or a virtual school or a tutor, or whatever works for your child. Look for materials that don’t take a ton of planning on your part. Try to give your child things to do that he can explore as independently as possible. This builds confidence and gives you a little breathing room.

If your kids like hearing stories, let me introduce you to a wonderful web site called Librivox.org, where audiobooks of thousands of great books are available for free download. We rip them on CD, listen to them in the car and upload them to our iPods. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO IT ALL YOURSELF, remember?

I also highly recommend the workbox system as a homeschool organizational tool. Its primary use is to foster child independence and self-motivation.

Finally, do not be afraid to blend some of the above strategies. Nature walks can help you foster closeness with your children AND be educational; life skill training is educational AND helps you manage your time as a single parent better; teaching your child to be responsible for his belongings and space, and incorporating him into the success of a well-run household, fulfills parenting duties AND helps you delegate your responsibilities as a single head of household.

As a single parent homeschooler, I have a lifestyle that has three equally valuable and important components. Finding the balance between the three, and finding ways to integrate them in a fulfilling and meaningful way, is an ongoing challenge – but it is doable, and oh, is it ever worthwhile.

I know there are a lot of great tools out there for homeschool planning and organization of your daily lesson plans, transcripts, etc. Just a few off the top of my head that I know of are the the free Homeschool Sked Track, the free and paid versions of Homeschool Tracker and the $99/year planner from Simply Charlotte Mason. I’ve heard rave reviews about both of those, but I’m on a very tight budget as a single parent homeschooler and I’m going to keep it real: if I’m going to spend $40-100 on homeschool materials, it’s not going to be on something that keeps ME organized; it’s going to be on books and materials for Shorty.

My real issue with all of these is that being a highly visual-kinesthetic person, I feel better having written things down by hand vs. typing them into a computer, and more easily and quickly understand things if I can flip a few pages and skim rather than click around. If that doesn’t sound like you, I encourage you to check out the above sites; they all come well-reviewed!

Anyway, with that criteria in mind – cheap/free, visually-based and flexible – this is how I put together Shorty’s portfolio this year.

First, I started with Donna Young’s Planning Forms. If you are new to planning for homeschool, I recommend reading her Planning for Beginners page. She also has some good advice there about how to customize your portfolio and has many free printable options. It’s one of my favorite homeschooling sites ever!

Andrea’s Step-by-Step Homeschool Planning and Portfolio Organization Method

There are lots of ways to do this, but this is how I’ve approached it each year. Doing this over the summer helps keep us on track all year long and saves me a lot of time and effort.

1. I start with a 3″ or 4″ binder with sleeves, and insert a nice cover page in the front of the binder that I make in Word, something with nice school-related clip art, and my son’s name, grade and school year underneath in nice font.
2. The first page of my portfolio inside is a printed calendar of the school year.
3. I put this in a plastic protector sleeve back to back with an attendance form. Not everyone has to keep track of attendance, but our umbrella school requires it. I use her basic form because that’s all my umbrella school requires. I write in the date every day we “do school.”
4. If you need to keep track of the time spent doing school, she’s got forms for that, too.
5. I put in a simple book and media list of my choice and write in all the books and educational media Shorty sees that year. (Her disclaimer at the top of that page always makes me laugh.)
6. This is different than a course of study planner, which is the list of the main books, curricula and materials you’re planning to use that year for each subject.
7. Some people like to put in their yearly goals and objectives for each child. I am not one of those people, by the way. But it is a requirement in some states.
8. This year is Shorty’s first year of junior high, so I am also keeping a transcript. Or, y’know, I’m going to attempt it.
9. If you want to keep up with grades and attendance, Mrs. Young has a wonderful quickstart guide for doing so.

Whew! And we haven’t even gotten to the actual planning part! Brace yourselves, y’all, we’re going in!

Guide to Free Yearly Lesson Planners

In the past, I’ve found Mrs. Young’s planning and portfolio sets very helpful. We liked the Portfolio Set, which includes a matching book list and field trip log.

I also really like the straightforward curriculum planner from OldFashionedEducation.com, which we used all last year and this summer and doubled as a sort of checklist.

However, this year I discovered Sue Patrick’s Workbox System of homeschool organization and both Shorty and I are quite hooked. Read more about the system on my blog here.

However, I couldn’t find a planner that I could use BOTH to plan my workbox contents, including academic and “fun” stuff, AND could also go in my portfolio for Shorty as a record or log of EVERYTHING we’re doing, not just stuff that goes in the boxes, but also field trips, music lessons, artist and composer studies, family devotionals and read-alouds, and other projects.

Readers of this blog may recall that I had previously made a plain workbox planner with 5 days per page, plus a space for notes, but what about everything else? I’d need a second log to keep track of our school day completely, which seemed redundant and confusing.

So of course, I had to make my own workbox planner that doubled as a portfolio planner and record keeper. Here it is!

Right-click and save:

Andrea's Portfolio Planner w/ Name and Date (115)
This has the  student name and date across the top of each week, helpful if you have more than one child.

Andrea's Portfolio Planner w/ Term, Week & Date (95)
This one is best for one child, with space for the term, week, and date across the top of each page.

This is a weekly portfolio planner for use with the workbox system, with 5 days scheduled and 12 boxes per day, one for each box, plus space below each day to write the things you do with your child that doesn’t go in the boxes, and a sixth space for notes for that week.

I print these out front and back to a page and hole-punch them and plan to stick them in the portfolio binder as a detailed record of what we have done this year.

Some people like to print this one week at a time. I like to plan, so I print out entire years in advance and fill them in subject by subject with a pencil. If I ever need to change anything, I can just erase.

This is free to use as-is, just abide by my terms of use and do not upload it to any other site without asking first.

Since people asked on my last one, I am able to create custom planners for individual families’ needs and preferences, including changing the words, colors, background shades, fonts, numbers of boxes, custom graphics, etc., for a small fee per custom planner. Please contact me if you’re interested in that, but in the meantime, this all-purpose basic planner is here for free and will work for most people. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago while making my usual round of approximately 47273423 homeschooling blogs, I stumbled upon the concept of organizing your child’s day with Sue Patrick’s Workbox System. It is a highly hands-on and visual means of organizing your child’s activities, organizing yourself as a homeschooling mom, using what resources you have more effectively, and fostering independence, fun and self-direction in the child.

The workbox system has become something of a fad in the homeschooling blogosphere and there is an overwhelming amount of information out there, so I’m going to let Sue Patrick tell you herself in her own presentation how the system works, even though she and I have very different worldviews.

There are lots more links to look at. I liked this post by Tracey in Australia because she has a sort of FAQ about workboxes, with pictures of her own. There is a wonderful and very busy Yahoo! group with many helpful people that will answer your questions and give you suggestions. The book comes with access to tons of free printables, including everything you need to make the components of the system.

This system works with any curriculum and any style of homeschooling – from unschooling to Classical to everything in between. We have been using our own version with magazine racks instead of the clear plastic bins, and it has been a huge hit with Shorty. It gives him a sense of independence and personal responsibility while providing him with structure and predictability in a highly visual-spatial way that he enjoys so much he’s declared it “genius”.

I plan what I put in each box by using a grid I made, which has a 4×3 square box of cubes for each day. The cubes correspond to which box is where, and I simply fill in what I’m going to have Shorty do that day, using a separate planner for guidance and an “idea file” for the fun/ center/ enrichment boxes that I’ve been keeping.

Here is the workbox planner I made, in PDF format. Sue Patrick has one, but this was my method of making it more visual for myself. Please right-click and save to your hard drive. It’s free to use; you can either laminate it and use an erasable marker to fill it in week by week, or if you’re a planning freak like me, you can print out one for each week of your school year

Andrea's 5-day workbox planner (400)

UPDATE: Please see my other tools for portfolio planning with workboxes on my downloads page!

Please feel free to link to this post if you’d like to share this workbox planner with others, but please, don’t upload this to any other web site without letting me know first.

Here are some more helpful links about this system:

Workboxes Yahoo! group – indispensable,with tons of printables.
Teacher File Box – membership site with thousands of printable activities and centers for workboxes (it’s only 99 cents to join)
Workbox FAQ by Tracey
Another detailed explanation w/ pictures
Workboxes with Sterilite drawers, with pictures of how she breaks down her curriculum for each drawer
An excellent and thorough explanation
What’s in the Box? – Idea blog for workboxes
Preschool activity bags for workboxes for littles
Laura’s Ziploc Baggie Method
Another Mom’s sterilite drawers

It’s ironic that I say this, as she’s quite adamant that you try her system to a T, but due to extreme space limitations (I live in a tiny 1BR apartment) I had to go with magazine racks instead. I’ll try to upload pictures of what our set up looks like. In the meantime, I hope this information is a blessing to people out there the way it has been for me. As a single parent who home educates, I’ve often found it challenge to manage my time so that Shorty gets EVERYTHING he wants to do, done, and I do, too. This is definitely helping me do that, and for that alone, it’s worth its weight in gold.