Our new school system!

I'm so excited about work boxes. You can read about the work box system on Sue Patrick's website.

I was needing something to change up our schooling. Something that would help me do more with Elijah and make use of all these resources I own. I have a ton of kits and hands on stuff that I never get around to pulling out.

If you know me you know that I'm a very laid back homeschooler, almost an unschooler so this has to be a simple system for me to even think about doing it.
I would not do anything that was going to cause me more stress!

Here's how it works. At night I'll look around the schoolroom and pull out 12 things I want Elijah to do the next day. I'll put those items (one per box) in our twelve work boxes we have set up. The next morning Elijah will do whatever is in box one and then put that book or activity away before moving on to box two. When he finishes box 12 he is finished with school. On days we will head out the door in the middle of the morning he'll only have a few boxes to do.

Elijah was so excited to get started on his boxes.

Here is what I put in the boxes.

1. math book

2. foam pyramid project (SS fair is Friday)

3. how to draw Egypt stuff book

4. writing workbook

5. a wooden pig, paper plate, paper towel, paint brush & cup for water

6. our FIAR book and activity

7. cards with the number words for one through twenty for Elijah to put in order at the pocket chart

8. skill workbook

9. geography flash cards

10. scrabble apple (this is like the banana grams that Rock Solid sells, but I found this at Wal-Mart with the card games)

11. subtraction cube

12. make your own mummy project

This is the perfect system for ME. I'm so excited that all these resources I have will be getting used. No more, what do I do next questions. Most of the boxes Elijah can do on his own, but some will be boxes for us to work on together.

So where did I find the stand and boxes? Target!

The stand was in an orange box on the closet organizing isle. It is a shoe rack for $15. The boxes are on the plastic isle for $1 a box.

It's all very simple to put together!

In Sue Patrick's method she numbers the boxes 1 - 12 and has the numbers on with Velcro and a chart to put the numbers on when the child finished a box. That seems like over kill or making something simple more complicated to me and Elijah knows numbers in order so I did our boxes a little different. Elijah needs practice on reading so I wrote the number words out for his boxes.

We are changing our school room theme to a space theme so I found some little rockets and wrote the number words on them. I taped the rockets on the boxes with packaging tape.

I'm sure I'll be posting more about this system.