The Johnson Crew!

Today I'm sharing with you my top 10 must-haves for homeschooling these are the items that I feel like we must have do I say that already yeah but these are the things that help our homeschool and our house really to run smoothly and stay organized and be tidy and just all the things that help us to accomplish homeschooling and this is also part of a big collaboration with a bunch of other awesome homeschool moms that will be sharing their must-haves for homeschooling and everybody's list is going to be different some moms might be sharing ideas or principles

And things that they stick to to help things run smoothly just whatever it is to help them get home school done in their house they're going to share that with you today so I'll leave a link below to that playlist and this is all hosted by my sweet friend anna over at just making it work she is an awesome mom to six kids and if you haven't been to her channel yet I'll leave a link to that below as well you should definitely go and check her out all of her videos are just full of nuggets of wisdom

And she really keeps it real over there I love all of her videos her channel is all about large homeschooling family logistics and home management so let's get into it so the first item on my list is a bookshelf and we actually have more than one obviously a bookshelf is so helpful for organizing all the things as a homeschooler you're going to be collecting lots of books and we have science kits and manipulatives and all kinds of things that a bookshelf really helps us to stay organized with

Now I do want to add in this caveat that if you don't have a homeschool room like a designated space for it that's okay if you don't have space for a big bookshelf back when we were using just our kitchen table we obviously had less stuff than it was less kids that we were homeschooling and all of that but there was a closet a hall closet just off the kitchen that I was able to store all of our supplies in and that way it wasn't like this crazy mess that we were keeping on the table all the time

So any kind of shelf that you're able to use so you can keep your supplies organized right the second thing is organizer drawers okay so these are just from walmart we have another stack down here I only have these set up for one of my kids but it's really really useful if you have curriculum that has several different books or items and things that go along with it for each subject so she's got like a textbook and a workbook for each of her subjects and some of them have like little reading books or little flashcards

So it's really helpful to keep them organized by subject in each of these drawers so big fan of these and this leads me to my next item which is file folders because what we do is when they're done with a worksheet is they're going to put it into the file folder that's in here and this is how we store their work throughout the year and it just keeps it nice and organized from the rest of papers and manipulatives and whatever else needs to live in here

Okay and then the next item I really love for staying organized and keeping our school room looking pretty tidy are these magazine holders I think is what you call them I'll look them up and leave a link for you but um obviously it can look kind of crazy in your bookshelf I got all these colors going on so down here it's kind of nice to have just this blank white to cover up all the the craziness that lives within this is just would end up looking really messy having all of that out

And then my oldest uses them facing the other direction on his desk he just doesn't have as much stuff for his schoolwork so he can fit all of his books into one of these sitting right on his desk and then the other one holds his file folders to contain his worksheets throughout the year and then also within our bookshelf I really love having bookends this may sound really silly but it took me until like a month ago to realize how great bookends are finally ordered some

And I got a huge pack like a bulk pack of like 14. um and so we are good to go and they don't cost very much but this looked really really messy before it was all leaned over on the side almost like falling down and anytime the kids wanted to get something out it like threatened to bring this whole thing down and it was really hard to put stuff back so the bookends help keep that really organized nice and straight and then we also use them over here we do have another bookshelf

But instead of having these like laying on top of each other and trying to pull stuff out or falling over to the side you know these spiral bound books they're not hard covers they like to flop over so I find these bookends to be super helpful just to hold things up and it just makes the bookshelf look a lot tidier and it serves the functional purpose of being able to pull stuff out pretty easily and put it away pretty easily another must-have for homeschooling and I say must-have

But I just bought this past year as well um is a marker carousel and I'll leave a link below for this as well because I don't remember if that's the name for it but here it is it's an acrylic pencil holder and it's a lazy susan it might not be an exact must-have but I do love this thing now that we have it one I really like the acrylic aesthetic it looks really nice in here everybody can see our supplies really easily to grab what they need

So we've got gel pens pencils dry erase markers tape markers scissors if you can't tell organization is really important to me another thing that I find to be a must-have is a printer but specifically we have a toner printer it has saved us a lot of money versus the printers that use ink cartridges especially when the kids decide that they want to like make copies of their hand and print those out 50 times this is it this is our printer we love it it does have a scanner as

Well and where you can feed the documents on top so obviously we use this for a lot more than just home school but it comes in very handy for homeschooling this next thing is not really a must-have but it's like it's a must-want is that a thing it is so fun to have in your home school it's a laminator I love this thing it's super fun it makes me feel like I can make any kind of learning resource that I want to make so if you want to make some durable flash cards or handwriting worksheets

And use dry erase markers on it or any kind of worksheet that you can just keep reusing over and over and over because you're using dry erase markers on it it's super helpful we've used it to make little learning games and that way it keeps them durable so we can keep using them over and over and I've used them for other random things in our house too so really enjoy having a laminator it's like a thing right like you might be a homeschool mom if you own a laminator

Okay second to last thing I want to show you is a planner planners are super useful I used to love having these in school actually I just started using these last year with my fourth grader so instead of me having to make all the lesson plans every day once my kids hit fourth grade I'm putting that responsibility in their court it just it really helps to teach some self-responsibility some time management if they are the ones in charge of their school day now I say that with like a million caveats

But like obviously I still have the grand master plan for the year and I sat down with him in the beginning of his fourth grade year last year and just showed him these are the different subjects you have you need to do one lesson a day or whatever it was so you need to write down what you need to do each day and show me that you did it all so I like that I'm not having to be such a micro manager of their school day once they hit fourth grade they can be a little bit more independent of course I'm still checking in with them throughout the day to make sure that they're actually getting their work done

And he's showing me his worksheets after he's done them to make sure that they're right all that kind of stuff so I'm still really involved but starting to slowly hand over more and more of that responsibility to the kids as they get older so we're just slowly stepping that up each year and so this is a great way to keep track of their schoolwork without me having to be the one laying out a lesson plan for him every day and then last but not least the most important must-have for any homeschool mom is chocolate I mean I can't survive without chocolate these are especially good I recently picked up from aldi they are sea salt dark chocolate caramels they're

So good all right that's all I have for you today thanks for hanging out with me today if you are new to my channel we are The Johnson Crew my name is Sarah and I have four kids and my channel is all about homeschooling and mom life so if that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button below if you've enjoyed this video definitely hit that like button for me super appreciate that and don't forget to check out the playlist below of all the other moms who are sharing their homeschool must-haves with you

And thanks so much for joining me today I will catch you next week thanks bye