How we home educate - planning and organising

I have been spending lots of time this month organising and planning. I realised that I was amassing a huge amount of completed activities, work and art which were mainly from Harry so I have filed those allowing us to start the new school year afresh. 

I have ordered the workbooks we will be using and have a couple of literature based studies planned (Lost and Found - Oliver Jeffers and The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle). I have organised some of our other activities into seasons and have a file for each season with activity sheets and craft ideas.

I have bought myself a large A4 notebook split into sections which I am going to use as a kind of permanent file, recording ideas of activities, games, products, things needed as we go along etc. I have always been a great list-maker and usually have a couple of notebooks on the go but I felt from last year that a book purely for home ed would be useful.

I have bought both boys an A3 art file to store artwork as we go along. I don't keep everything as they produce a lot but I keep things that are good examples of what they are doing at particular ages or special/themed items.

With respect to other work, I file as we go into a box file as this is quickest and sometimes we are doing related activities over more than one day. When that is full I spend around an hour and file into ring binders, stapling related items together (these have been covering about 4-5 months worth of work). I don't try to split these into subjects as we do a lot of cross-curricular work. Anything Peter produces at the moment will also go into this file and later I will probably split up their work.

My methods don't always work perfectly (the occasional chaos of everyday life with small children sees to that) but they seem to allow me to stay ahead enough in terms of planning to be able to produce activities when needed and to capture the work we do.