how to organize to educate?

I grew up in a big house that had its own library. I live in a two-bedroom apartment without a library. The first question that came to mind after I collected all of this curriculum for children that are going to be educated in my home from kindergarten to 12th grade... Yeah it took me a minute to figure out how to organize all this stuff. How do I get my children to do chores to keep all this stuff clean. How do I integrate education and keeping the house clean? Thank you YouTube thank you fly lady love you to death. So first I had to come up with a chore chart Lord have mercy I didn't have a chore chart my grandma said clean this clean that it's a child's place to keep the house clean I'm not paying for what is it it's not a nanny what am I thinking of what's the word oh yeah a housekeeper. As an adult living on my own I knew what needed to be done to keep the house clean but now I have to deal with three other people who make their own messes. What in the world am I going to do? Chore chart organizing for other people in the house. it didn't come naturally to me because being the type of person that I am I knew what needed to be done and it was very easy for me to do it in small chunks but when you're teaching a child how to do it a chore chart is like a must. How do you incentivize a child to do chores? But at the same time I need to teach them accountability and get them excited to do work because when they become adults they're going to have to do work they're going to have to clean the house they're going to have to take care of themselves it's a process. So I broke it down self-care be it your physical outward appearance your inward so eating healthy exercising and then taking care of the home keeping your space clean and organized making sure that the kitchen and bathroom were clean because that goes into your inward health because when you're preparing food you want to make sure that it's clean so that you don't get sick. And then once we take care of ourselves in words and outwards and we take care of our homes in words and outwards the next step is to take that care into the world. Once you take care of your body inside and out with food stretching and exercise we cannot neglect the mind both the logical and the spiritual. When I came up with my concept for my chore chart I wanted to make sure that their chores included all of those areas. Once they got older I also had to integrate a pet because I wanted them to take care of something else besides themselves and obviously as a parent they're not taking care of me so but that was the natural thing for them. I landed on cats because that was the easiest thing to think of and I really like cats so you know that was a selfish thing but you can pick whatever pet you want. 

When it came time for me to start designing my chore chart I wanted to make sure that I included their school work into their chores so it kind of gave them a framework on how things should go how the day was going to progress how they would work on certain things like handwriting typing their music classes there are classes those external things. That way since their children they have their consistency they know what's coming so they feel comfortable and secure about how the day is going to go which is the natural development of children they want to feel secure and they want to know what's coming so that there's no surprise or anxiety about what's coming up I learned that by reading a child development book because I wanted to make sure that I raised healthy confident mature adults. That goes into the concept of what was the end in mind when I started doing everything that I was doing. So I had to start off with how I needed the house to be organized in order to allow me to integrate the education portion seamlessly. The fly lady has a homeschooling thing I don't even know what to call it but a scenario of how to keep the house clean and organized and tidy while you're home schooling your children. Then I found another YouTuber Andrea Mills who unfortunately passed away too soon when she gave birth to her last child and she had all kinds of things that would help me integrate the educational portion into keeping the house clean. Andrea Mills used a c e and I liked how they had their educational charts to keep track of the lessons that they were doing the pages they were doing and gave points accordingly I love that whole demerit and I'm star system but I didn't like AC because it was religious based she herself didn't enjoy it and she actually said just forget about it but I didn't even want it to be presented to my children I didn't want that to be a distraction. So I simply just made my own. Not hard to do in Excel I mean it's literally a box with some words in it so stick that in their folders put their little worksheets in there and they can just work on their handwriting and their math concepts and whatever science notebooking they needed to do. So I came up with the sage program satisfactory average good exceptional it's not the exceptional that you would think as in oh my gosh it's great it's just like okay I'll accept that. And I wanted it to be like the demerits were four things like lying stealing things that you're not supposed to do. And they got points for completing all of their lessons doing all of their chores and whatever else extra that they did they got bonuses. I created an entire sage system that I was going to try to develop an app for but I got sidetracked and life just got away from me but I will get back to that at some point I have a coupon system that I got from another YouTuber and I have a tile system that doesn't have words for when they were little from another youtuber. It integrated the learning chores as well as the cleaning chores beautifully. That led me into understanding occupational therapy and learning about children that had disabilities that probably couldn't read into their older ages and I discovered I can't remember the name of it it was a star kids program or something like that and it had Stars and magnets that you could put up so that the child would know what's going on that's also when I started looking into child development and how children wanted to feel safe and secure and know what's going on to limit anxiety in their lives. So that fit in perfectly as well. So between fly lady helping me keep my house clean and Andrea Mills giving me the idea for the incentives and demerits program I was good to go. Well I should say for the kids point of view but for me I had to go to Christy clover to figure out how I was going to organize all of my curriculum from the teaching perspective organizing things by color and making sure that everything was in boxes that could be easily stored and moved when I needed to get it for different subjects and organize my materials so that while I'm piecing all this stuff together I can have it for the next child like my 5 year old thank you so it makes a little bit easier for me to start over because of Christy clover I was able to have all of this stuff organized ahead of time. Organizing the house is not that hard once you get all the pieces together especially when you're in a small apartment. Having the shelves organized by subject having a shelf dedicated to the current years curriculum even though I have curriculum for basically all the years right now. It's amazing how comfortable your environment is when it's organized and you know where things are. The problem with me is that after covid my 11 year old decided that he wanted to reorganize everything by color that's another thing that kind of threw me for a loop because my personality does not look kindly on things that I'm not organized the way that I organize them that's me problem. I wish I could put a picture of my stage program let me see I think I can find it I had to also print out their report cards because some of the programs that I had signed them up for wanted those programs so they could get additional things like lunch packs and food and toys and stuff like that so I kind of had fun doing it coming up with a progress report that actually talked about what it is that they had been doing reviewing some of the stuff that we had gone to the programs we had participated in it was nice looking bad so this is my first iteration of my school calendar.

I had mentioned before that our year starts in January and ends in October that simply because I wanted to start after my birthday my oldest son has his birthday around Easter or spring break so that was a natural way to take a break. Then my middle child's birthday is in December and my ex-husband's birthday is in November and then of course that starts off the whole you know Thanksgiving Christmas New Year's extravaganza of just way too much to be doing anything else at the time so it was an easy transition to just have a break from November to after my birthday and then having a break for my oldest son's birthday when everybody else was taking off for spring break anyway. Then I decided that it would be nice to have little intermittent breaks in between because I didn't have everything together at the same time back then. So I can't remember the YouTube channel that I had discovered but they had six weeks on one week off for planning and then 6 weeks back on and then everything was broken up into three or four 13-week blocks which I absolutely loved and then it kind of naturally fell into where we had 13 weeks off from November to January it was like it was creepy so it was like oh my God how did that happen so from the November to January it seems like it's only like 8 weeks but it's not because even though in school you know how you start school but you don't really start school it's kind of like we're easing our way back in that's naturally how it fell off so the first two weeks of school it's kind of like just easing our way back in and just setting it up to where we're like okay we're going to start doing written things again let's get it together and then by the end of that 13th week that's when I'm officially planning the next 13 blocks I mean the 13 week block. But this is how I had set up my sage program.

since I work from home as an engineer doing construction management before I started home schooling I needed to make sure that the children were aware what was going on so once they were old enough to sit down and be still and listen and understand what we were doing especially when we started talking about divorce. I had to initiate family meetings and as time went on I realized that I needed to integrate the business portion into the family meetings so it wasn't just talking about what the children want communicating grievances and so on and so forth we initially naturally transitioned into talking about what was wrong and how we could fix it and I don't understand how people and families don't have family meetings it just doesn't make any sense to me so when I was developing my planner for both the kids and myself I made sure that it naturally had a place for them to document their family meeting notes what they wanted to talk about the next meeting and so on and so forth.

this is my homeschool planner page set I had made it so that I could track both of my children considering that they're not exactly the same ones a little bit older than the other they weren't always doing the exact same things I wanted to make sure that I kept track of everything that they were doing make sure I didn't forget anything even if they were learning the same concepts it might not be the same level of concept. This was my earlier copy where I was teetering between philosophy and theology and then I ultimately decided that I just wanted to go with philosophy because theology was not something that we really went into we kind of just kept it abstract so that they could later go into whatever spiritual path they themselves gravitated to I just wanted them to have the foundation I didn't want to tell them that Baptist or Protestants of any kind were better than the other when in all honesty I think all religions lead to the same place. But I wanted to make sure that I focused on making sure that I covered all the subjects one because the state requires 900 hours of you know math science history and language arts but of course I wanted to make sure that I included fine arts and computer sciences.

this is my current iteration of the planner pages that I designed that include my family meeting on the fold out over there that includes the weekly action steps so whatever we decide in our family meeting we write down what it is that we need to accomplish during the week and we write it down. I didn't include a completed family meeting page because like I said we include business topics as well as personal topics and I didn't want to show that so this is just a blank copy of one of the weeks that we had that was basically just chore and school stuff related like well now it is drop off notice of intent and find a daycare and pay the bills and check the balances nothing too specific I guess. But basically I had found a guide on how to run a family meeting and if it is something that you would think about including I will happily link to them if asked but I think family meetings are kind of personal but you have to figure out what works best for you but the basic concept is you figure out what's wrong you figure out how to address it and then you write down the steps to fix it. Organizing that mentally is very helpful when running a homeschool because there are so many things going on especially when you're a single parent your self-employed and your educating your children all at the same time it can be come overwhelming and if you don't get all of those thoughts out of your head I am the prime example of how you will become a depressed mess and lose 3 years of your life. I'm being overdramatic but it's kind of a reality where if you don't get everything out of your head you can become overwhelmed and things will fall through the cracks that should not fall through the cracks simply because you didn't have a place for them. Oh and therapy helps to.