4Real Forums: A Place for Everything

Oh, Dearest Mother, Sweetest Virgin of Altagracia, our Patroness. You are our Advocate and to you we recommend our needs. You are our Teacher and like disciples we come to learn from the example of your holy life. You are our Mother, and like children, we come to offer you all of the love of our hearts. Receive, dearest Mother, our offerings and listen attentively to our supplications. Amen.

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Planning and Ordering our Days
4Real Forums : Planning and Ordering our Days

Topic: A Place for Everything

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Servant2theKing
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Joined: Nov 13 2005
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Posted: May 16 2008 at 5:58am \| IP Logged

When I start to obsess over the clutter generated by our homeschooling life, I try to remind myself that creativity, learning and wondrously healthy occupation are at the root of all those "messes". When I consider the alternative...not having such splendid activity occurring in our lives...I chide myself for not seeing the blessedness of it all! I've often heard lonely widows bemoaning the days when they thought a tidy house was so important. Oneday, all the clutter and hustle, bustle of our homeschooling days will be gone and we will yearn for those piles!

BTW, I used to spend hours and hours sorting and filing piles of paperwork...nowadays I simply toss it all into a rubbermaid container and stow it away in the far recesses of our basement. Oneday we're going to have a GIANT bonfire to celebrate our liberation from obsessing over clutter!

Stephanie, bookshelves inside closets works so nicely, huh! We finally have all our books in an extra room with most in the very deep closet of our newly rechristened library/"spareoom". I love being able to visit our own little library and putting away new treasures after visiting our library bookstore. Somehow clutter isn't generated quite as quickly in this room! I'm not sure why, but I have a suspicion our children think of this room like the regular library and automatically "treat books like their friends" and practice their library manners in this part of the house!

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ALmom
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Joined: May 18 2005
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Posted: May 16 2008 at 12:24pm \| IP Logged

When children were young and played with extreme creativity - ie blocks, trains, duplos, mini animals, little people, etc. all at once - and made huge messes, I did learn to assign each child a different item at clean up time. Youngest child tackles blocks (that is easy as it all goes in one big bin. When someone was dragging their feet or the mess was left, I knew which child to call back in and it eliminated the fights resulting from differences in age and ability to scoop quickly and tempermental distractibility.

As far as piles - this is still a work in progress. Eliminating unnecessary paper at the end of the day helps a lot. I usually do my pile straightening after all kiddos are in bed and when dh is doing checkbook balancing or other such. Removing my piles would result in me permanently forgetting something critical. I'm not totally satisfied with the system yet, but am working on having only one place for my piles. I got those letter files to use for helping some of the boys keep various piles of subjects on their desk in an organized way. It doesn't solve the rock collections, misc. parts piles and other such. I'm trying to get to the point where my piles are all neat notebooks rather than loose and scattered paper. Ie - 3 ring binders for each child's lesson stuff and tucking in TM in pockets in the 3 ring binder (even using photo sheets to make pockets - helps some for all the stuff that is thin enough.

I do not think there is any way for us to avoid the busy season when one term is ending and another is being planned. It helps me to realize that this is temporary chaos.

I also have one room that is supposed to be pile free (our family room where we recreate together). I need to take the little table out of that room as it becomes a surface to entice piles.

We brought it in over Thanksgiving and when my brother was visiting so we had a place to set the Scrabble game - but we need to have its permanent home elsewhere or it is a magnet attracting those reproducig piles!!!!

I do notice that when I am on top of junk, most of my children follow my pace. It is as if they get their cue from me. When I have everything in its place, my children tend to be better about it. When I don't, then all of our natural weakness in this area comes out in full force in the kids as well.

We have just established a sweep of the house rule for prior to afternoon break time so hopefully that will help. I realized that I carefully trained the oldest but by the time our 5 yo came along, we just haven't been as good at the diligent make sure you put this away before you wander off to something else. I don't mind many toys used at once. I do mind stuff strewn out one place and left but new stuff out in another location. If you are playing with everything together, fine. When you move on to some other play, then be sure you clean up the first play items first. I am needing to establish this with my youngers more thouroughly - they always do a sweep at the end of the day but really the goal is to develop the habit of putting away before moving on to a new activity.

Janet

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