Need a brain in the binder.....pulling my hairs out with organization

[Holly IN]

I am going to have to get a binder and really keep everything in one place. I am wondering what exactly do I need in a Teacher Binder??

I am using HST+ but I still need a binder to keep everything in one place. Notes put in there about any type of review and to keep myself sane. With a new high school, new middle schooler and an elementary student, I think it is time that I get a teacher planner book for me known as brain in a binder.

If you do this, what do you put in it?

I have some ideas....

each child's section then a section within each....

but what?

Thanks!

Holly

[Musicmom]

Don’t know if this will help or not (I’m not using a tracking program at all), but here’s what my teacher binder contains.

I have 2 kids, a high schooler and a middle schooler (well, actually this year it will be 2 high schoolers). I basically have a big section for each child with 3 subsections each, which is sort of what you’re envisioning I think. I do it with all the same size tabs though—just putting each child’s name and the name of the section on the tab (e.g. Child1 Lesson Plans). My sections for each child are:

Lesson Plans: Here I keep all my various lessons plans/overall subject plans for this child. Mostly this is a great big Word document where I’ve listed my plans for each subject this child is doing—the books they are using, a general description of the pace we need to keep for each (like, x pages of grammar/day or week, a chapter of math every 2 weeks, etc.) what I need to assign weekly, and a list of monthly checkpoints with how much we need to have accomplished at each checkpoint in order to stay on track for the year. Any other lesson plans, such as more complicated ones I’ve had to create when it wasn’t all laid out for me already, and also those from any outside or online courses, also go in here for easy reference. I write all over these pages as I go—anything I need to reschedule, anything I need to remember to assign at some point, whether we’re behind and why and if I need to do anything about it, etc. I then refer to these documents as I do my children’s weekly assignment sheets.

Assignment Sheets/Activity Logs: I write out weekly assignment sheets for my children, plus have them keep a separate weekly log of what they did when. I gather these papers at the end of the week, make sure they’re dated and store them in this section—with the assignment sheets in the front piling up in reverse chronological order, and the logs at the back, piling up in chronological order. This way I can easily look at the front paper and see what I assigned last week, or turn to the very last page and see what they logged for last week.

Scores: In this section I keep a bunch of notebook paper, a page for each subject that I’m keeping track of scores for, and I note the scores as I give them. Then the scores are all in one place for me to determine grades (for high school) or just see how things are going (middle and elementary school).

At the front of my binder I keep various schedules for easy reference—our school schedule, our public school’s calendar (helpful for outside activities that follow it), and right now I also have my overall high school plan for the older child there.

In the back of the binder, I have a couple of working sections, one for chores/household management and one for future school plans, where I jot down ideas, fiddle around with plans, etc. I also have a section for Tips, where I keep any important ideas from other sources that I want to refer to often.

At the end of the year, I take out the 3 sections of papers for each child, put the assignment sheets in chronological order, label each section with sticky notes, put my homeschool schedule and my copies of the official papers I sent to the school district on top, and put it all in a cheap binder which I file away as a record of our school year.

I use a 1-inch binder both for my working binder and the cheap one I file away—and with 2 kids it is chock full by the end of the year. With more kids, I would definitely go to a bigger binder.

Hope this gives you a few ideas to springboard from anyway. Good luck! :001_smile:

[MIch elle]

I keep a list of what we do together in the morning otherwise I forget:

song - which song & copy for each of us (if it's not in a book)
poetry - copy of poem currently memorizing


drills w/ rotating schedule of which to do on what day- math, geography, presidents, etc

history - important dates to remember

science - bones of the body