Grades, cleaning, transcripts, meal planning, portfolios, and more! Learn how to keep your papers and your sanity through easy organization tips for home.
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Back to School: Let’s Get Organized!
This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting the Homeschool Compass by shopping through our page! Getting started back to school gives us a chance for fresh inspiration for how to run our homeschools. Keeping things organized will make every part of homeschooling easier, from being able to find what you need when you […]
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Homeschooling While Working Remotely: Three Life Lessons
Homeschooling families are by and large a creative, talented, and steadfast bunch and have just the right type of parents to both work remotely and oversee their child’s education. If you’ve found yourself in this position, take heart! In my sixteen years of balancing a freelance writing career with homeschooling, […]
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Free Printable Homeschool Reading Log
There are lots of benefits to keeping a log of your children’s reading! It’s helpful in homeschool planning to be able to look back on what topics you’ve covered and what books you might want to work into your next year or semester. It gives your kids a sense of […]
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Loving Your Homeschool Space: Advice from 6 Veteran Homeschoolers
Cultivating a space that breathes life into learning can make all the difference to our homeschool experience. We long for a space that is orderly yet inviting, cozy yet primed for creative exploration. But living within our limitations to make the most of the spaces we have can be a […]
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The Home Cook: Thirty Days of Meals
Being able to cook is an important life skill. I was fortunate to learn how to cook from my mother who specialized in home economics in high school. Expand your repertoire by trying to prepare a variety of meals. Consider dietary guidelines (vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy free, etc.). This way, you […]
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5 Steps to Meal Planning
This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting the Homeschool Compass by shopping through our page! Picture this. You’ve already had a full day of doing the “mom thing.” The kids have reached their limits. Your husband will be home in an hour. You need to get dinner on the table fast, but you […]
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3 Questions to Ask as You Plan Your Homeschool Year
You’ve got your highlighters, your color-coded spreadsheets, your booklists and your cup of coffee! You’re laying out plans for amazing field trips that dovetail perfectly with your history and science readings, a math curriculum that’s sure to succeed, and literature read alouds that will keep everyone spellbound. You’ve accounted for […]
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Home Organization & Time Management Tips
I was raised in a home with little structure. I did not know how to plan ahead for meals, prepare a budget, clean a home, shop, pay bills, or balance a checkbook; much less keep a very busy family on track. I was raised in the 70s and 80s when […]
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5 Steps to Better Time Management
Productivity. It’s a word that can carry tremendous pride and immense guilt. In the course of a week, I can swing from, “Wow! I got so much done!” to “Did I get anything done?” And just when I think I’m doing well, some well-meaning article will tout that we can’t […]
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Homeschool Planning Using Checklists and Schedules
When it comes to homeschool organization the best tool I have in my teacher’s toolbox is a written plan for each child and me. Before you envision something huge and complicated, know I am referring to a simple, daily plan that each child can follow. This has been the best […]
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Inexpensive Organization
Aside from the fact that an organized space is just plain relaxing and enjoyable, there also are a few undeniable practical reasons to organize your space. The reason that carries the most weight with me is the fact that a lack of organization is expensive. Take a moment to think […]
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Enjoy the Cozy Days of Fall Without the Worry of Cleaning
Fall … my absolute favorite time of the year! Imagine the smell of cinnamon apples baking in the oven; the sight of leaves turning to beautiful colors of orange, red and gold; reading as a family by the glow of candlelight, while darkness falls in the early evening; and children […]
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Time Management with a Technological Twist
Throughout adolescence, a child’s ability to transition from one activity to the next is influenced by factors such as environment, routine, behavior modeling, and self-motivation. For many children, being able to independently navigate from preferred to non-preferred activities is a struggle. For many parents—especially those raising a child with autism […]
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The Plate-Spinning Mama
You homeschool. You work. You cook, clean, do the dishes, buy the food, and manage the laundry. You have a dog. You have a husband. You have children. You have a body. You have a lot of plates in the air. They are spinning. The first rule of thumb: You […]
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4 Questions to Ask When Choosing Your Homeschool Curriculum
Whether you look forward to curriculum shopping with the anticipation of a kid on Christmas morning or you dread the decision-making process year after year, reflect on these simple questions to take the stress out of your curriculum selection. Can you afford it? Expensive doesn’t always equal better. Straining your […]
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The Symphony of Routines
When was the last time you went to hear a performance by a symphony orchestra? Do you remember hearing the orchestra warm up? Each player tunes, plays, adjusts, and plays again on his own accord, with no regard to others in the area. Although you can hear the beauty in […]
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How to Create a Simple, Successful Homeschool Portfolio
It’s the time of year when many of us are winding down our homeschool for the season. You may be finishing strong and looking back on a year of exciting successes. Or you may be collapsing in exhaustion, eager to leave this year behind you. No matter how your school […]
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6 Steps to Keep Meal Planning Stress Away (with FREE Printable Planning Tools)
Food is fuel for the brain, right? But when there is a seemingly endless to-do list to contend with, you might find that meal planning just falls to the bottom of the priority list. But what if we said mealtime doesn’t have to be stressful? What if we said there […]
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10 Tips for Including Chores in Your Homeschool Routine
Ah, chores. Sometimes they can seem never-ending, right? Like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get through that to-do list. Not to mention when you add that carefully curated homeschool lesson plan to the agenda. But, have you ever considered chores being a part of the homeschool […]
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How to Organize Your Homeschool Life: Tips from Two Homeschooled Students
Here at Christianbook.com we are blessed to have two Homeschool Specialists, Alicia and Cassie, who were homeschooled growing up. Alicia was homeschooled through 8th grade, and Cassie was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. We’ve asked them to share some of their best tips for staying organized in the midst […]
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The Place for Homeschooling
Before you take out a loan to build an addition on your home for the perfect classroom, or think that you can’t homeschool without a line of credit for supplies, please consider a few points from a homeschool mama who got it all wrong in the beginning. Once my family […]
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Managing Home and Homeschool
Homeschooling by itself is a full-time job, and so is keeping house. Sometimes it seems when I focus on one, the other inevitably falls behind. Can you relate? Making our house a home for our families and educating our children is such important work, probably the most significant thing we’ll […]
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Making a Homeschool Schedule
Rhythm. This term, most associated with music is defined as movement or procedure with uniform or patterned recurrence of a beat, accent, or the like. What does the rhythm of your homeschool day sound like? Like a melodious orchestrated symphony or more like a cacophony? Establishing a homeschool schedule that […]
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High School Recordkeeping: Finding the Right Balance
Even the most relaxed homeschoolers sometimes get a bit stressed and paranoid as high school rolls around. They wonder if there is any way they can maintain a family-like environment, while still coming up with a transcript that will help their students get into college. In addition, the question arises: […]
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Organizing Your Homeschool On the Go
I am the mother of two teen-aged children. Before they were born, I was a school teacher. When they reached school-age and I began homeschooling, I still had what I call a traditional classroom mentality. I chuckle now when I remember hauling them out of bed bright and early each […]
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Organizing Your Preschooler and Your Preschool
As a Mom of a preschooler, I was overwhelmed when my mentor asked me what I was doing to help organize my preschooler and my preschool. All I could think of is, “How do I organize a hurricane?” I knew I didn’t want a rigid schedule but knew I needed […]
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How Daily Goals Help Me Organize My Active Homeschool
My days normally start pretty early with the alarm blaring to awaken me from my slumber by 6 a.m. I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, but rising before my children gives me a chance to have a few minutes of quiet time with the […]
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Color-Coding Your Homeschool
If you are the type of person who could tear open a bag of M&Ms® and just eat the candies as they tumble out, you may not be able to relate to the color coding of our homeschool chaos. However, if you, like me, carefully tear open that candy bag […]
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It’s Elementary! The Quick Reference to Organizing in the Elementary Grades
There are three major areas where children need to gain organizational skills. These include: their time, their schoolwork and their personal belongings. In all these areas, clearly defining expectations, having daily, consistent, schedules and systems, and reducing excess will create a formula for organizational success. Their Time When teaching children […]
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