Master Homeschool Binder: My System For Staying Organized All Year

Over my years of homeschooling, I’ve developed a system for organizing our homeschool year, which I haven’t deterred away from other than a few minor tweaks. This planning system has worked well for me, and even more so now that I am transitioning another child into our homeschool lessons.

The very first thing I do when I begin planning for a new homeschool year is print my Homeschool Curriculum Planner and work through it. You can read a handful of blog posts that I’ve shared my planning process using my Curriculum Planner, but the most recent one is here. Essentially, my yearly planning steps are

• Reflect and Review
• Yearly Schedule Overview (choosing first and last days, break weeks, etc.)
• Choose Curriculum
• Make Book and Supply Lists
• Pre-read and Lesson Planning
• Subject Scheduling
• Create Master Timetables
• Read Teacher Helps

Creating my Master Homeschool Binder

Every year I purchase a new 3 ring binder, and this year I went with this one with these tab dividers inside. I also like using these clear pouches to hold things like artist pictures.

My master bind is not my homeschool planner that I use for lessons, and weekly planning. I use my master binder mostly before lessons begin, and as a way to store and organize everything as an overview keepsake for the entire year.

Master Daily Timetable And Master Weekly Lesson Timetable

After working through creating a list of subjects, and determining the frequency for each subject (daily or 1-2x a week which I call “loop subjects”), I create a couple master timetables for our homeschool days.

These timetables are not ever done perfectly or exact, and I only create them as guides to help me visually see how we will order our days with the wide curriculum of homeschool subjects we use.

The second timetable I have in my binder is what I call my mother’s timetable which shows me an overview of the entire day, combining homeschool and home life. This includes time slots for chore zones, morning and evening routines, mother culture, OCN (Our Cooper Nest) work, and leisure. As a stay at home mom, it can be challenging to balance all that is required to be done as a homemaker so this just one method I find useful. Again, it is rarely done at the exact times and order, it just gives me an idea of how I can choose to order my time so that I can do both home and homeschool balanced with some things that I enjoy like journaling, Bible studies, blogging, and reading.

Curriculum Overviews and Objectives

I print off a screen shot of the curriculum overview or list some objects and keep them in my binder. I also keep a copy of the curriculum schedules for the entire year here.

Pre-Reading Notes and Lesson Helps

All my pre-reading notes, map questions, geography maps, and key names and dates for history lessons are placed in this divider.

Morning Menu Pages

Each of my children have a morning menu which contains our term’s recitation pieces, hymn and folk song lyrics, and artwork for our current picture study. I have all copies in here so I can easily reference, recite and sing along as needed.

Artist Pictures

As I shared above, I love these clear pouch pocket folders to store our artist prints all in one place and without punching holes in them. I print multiple copies for each child as a full size page, and then another copy of smaller postcard sizes to hang and display on our wall.

Teacher Helps and Encouragement

I love to skim through The Parents’ Review articles found on the Ambleside Online website and print off a few to read and highlight. I’ve also enjoyed the encouragement from articles written by the AO advisory which can be found here.

I’ve also kept notes here from other blogs I’ve read that gave encouragement and teacher helps on specific subjects that I enjoyed reading. I am continuously looking for ways to improve where needed and be encouraged in homeschooling so I like having a place for these types of materials to reference back to from time to time.

Notes for Ideas

I print off the “ideas” pages from the curriculum planner and place them at the back of my master homeschool binder so whenever I need to jot down something that’s related to our homeschool year, I have a place ready to do just that.

I live in a state that doesn’t require proof of record keeping, but I find that having my binder system each year is still a sure way to do that if I ever need it or need to look back and remember what we did for a given year.

My master homeschool binder has been a huge help to me throughout homeschooling so I am happy to answer any questions you may have about it in the comments!