Easy Tips to Reduce and Manage Homeschool Paper

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In this article, we will cover six places to apply practical tips and ideas to improve homeschool paper organization. You will reduce your workload, get your kids to manage their work better and save time at the end of the homeschool year. The first step is reducing the amount of paper you deal with on a daily basis. Think about all of the paper you manage and sort through right now.

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Schedules, maps, printable handwriting sheets, worksheets, notes pages, and more. It can all add up to a huge pile and a mess to sort through at the end of the school week, let alone school year. It doesn’t take many changes to become a homeschool paper organization expert. We have managed it with ten kids, that proves – anyone can have a peaceful in-box.

Simple Tips to Reduce Paper in Your Homeschool

A Great Way to Reduce Homeschool Paper: Make Digital Notes

The best way to improve homeschool paper organization is to reduce the amount of paper you have in the first place. We have easy access to the digital version of paper for math practice problems. We use a digital tablet we got from amazon for $15 in many different ways throughout our school day. The little ones like it for letter practice, since it still has a pencil feel. We added it to our homeschool supplies for math solving. There is plenty of room for even an advanced math problem to be solved. When they are done, a simple click of the button resets the display. This pairs great if you are using an online homeschool curriculum. Your child can confirm their answer in the program before they erase.

Last year, we purchased more digital resources. We added a  digital pencil and writing tablet that connects to the school computer directly. The kids can write on the tablet and it is displayed on the screen in the “scratch pad’ page of Teaching Textbooks. My daughter also uses this for her art elective work. She can work in Adobe Procreate while she follows a tutorial or a class in Skillshare in another tab on screen. This helps save on art supplies and allows her to be creative while still in our homeschool space.

Using Digital Programs for Correcting Papers for You

In the theme of reducing homeschool papers, one of the reasons I wanted to reduce the amount of paper was that I was not able to keep up on the grading of individual work. One year we had ten students in different levels of math. That is a lot of homeschool paperwork to go over each day. Some of my kids (one in particular!) liked to keep moving forward in his/her workbook. If I didn’t get the corrections made, that student would keep going right along with the same mistakes for several lessons.

The student was FRUSTRATED, I was FRUSTRATED. 

We solved the problem in a better way. Since I couldn’t multiply myself to get another homeschool mom, I did the next best thing, I purchased a digital program that did the corrections for me. I paid no more than I already had for a textbook and workbook, but it freed up a ton of time of my homeschool schedule. At the end of the year we moved to Fascinating Education, an online science program as well.

Digital and online programs are available in abundance. They are time savers and give working parents an opportunity to share the teaching workload with another adult. You can read about the 39 Tech Tools we have used over the years. It is a great idea to do some looking to find some tools that fits your families goals. Using a subject or full curriculum that has online lesson plans and testing is a great place to reduce paper clutter in your homeschool and reduce your workload as a homeschooling mom. 

Spiral Bound Workbooks for Built-in Homeschool Paper Organization

Speaking about science, we use Apologia Science. You can listen to the podcast to hear why I think Apologia prepares student for college level learning and read my review of Apologia Marine Biology. Their Student Journal is one of the items we added to our homeschool to help me manage paper in several ways. For one, all of the pages are in one place. No loose papers or 3-ring notebooks means no lost papers.

Second, I can open their Journal and know where my student is at in their daily tasks at a glance. I don’t have to find a binder or sort through a lot of stuff to get a snapshot of my child’s work. This grab and go ability helps me to do a much better job keeping my kids accountable. If it is easy for me to do, I am more likely to do it. You are probably the same.

Lastly, the Student Journals have a strong spiral binding and are very well made. I have not had one fail over a school year. Rifling through a bucket or bin of cast off school work, looking for a lost lesson is not my idea of an evening of fun. Workbooks are BIGGER than a piece of paper. They are far less likely to get lost than a single sheet of paper. If a subject doesn’t offer a workbook consider getting a pile of lined paper spiral bound with a plastic cover and having your child make a cover page for their own “Journal.”

When in doubt, buy the workbook.

Workbooks save you tons of time and the cost of printing. They usually last the full school year. The only exception to this was First Form Latin from Memoria Press. These student workbooks did not hold up throughout the full school year and the teaching notebook lost several pages. The program, however, is well structured, easy to follow and fairly easy for high schoolers to get the hang of.

A failing workbook in the middle of the school year is NOT a problem. When we ordered Second Form Latin, (you can read my review of third form in this post)I simply took the student workbooks to the office supply store and had them spiral bound for a couple bucks. Problem solved with little effort or dollars.

Simple Tips for Homeschool Paper Organization

Create a Digital File for Each Student Records

Create a document for each student and save it to google drive. In this keep your attendance records, homeschool records, compliance forms and any thing you filled out for the school district or state you live in. At the end of the year, add the homeschool curriculum you used each homeschool year. This is vital for you when you go to create transcripts for your older children. When I record curriculum used, I include: title, publisher, edition, year published and any notes about their progress. 

Keep this transcript in your files, forever. You never know when a child might need it for employment or continuing education. Information about creating a transcript can be found at Homeschool Iowa.

Establish a Homeschool Paper Turn-In Location

To win at the game of homeschool paper organization, you have to declare “NOT IT!”

You do not want to be responsible for any homeschool paper before they are turned in as completed work. Establishing a Turn-In location stops kids from handing you random Greek History papers on your way to the coffee pot. I can not be held responsible for paper handed to me BEFORE coffee.

Also, I have NO idea where that paper went to this day!

-every homeschool parent at some point

Choose a place and make sure everyone know where it is. It can be a hanging folder, a basket on top of your filing cabinet or any designated spot. As long as everyone knows that it is the only place for important papers to go! Having a turn-in location is the easiest way to transfer the responsibility from you, to your students. This rule goes for younger children too! If it is not in the turn-in bucket, it is not done. 

After I started working out of the house a few days a week, we needed to create some serious accountability again. Work was not getting completed, followed up on or checked. I needed some systems to help me. One of those systems was our Friday check out policy. 

Homeschool Paper Organization Needs Accountability to Work

It goes like this. If you want to have plans on the weekend, everything on our expectation sheet MUST be completed and turned in to be checked out by 4pm on Friday. If you didn’t get it done, not a problem. We can simply hang out this weekend and try again next week. You won’t nag, cry, or rage. Nowadays, I don’t even try to make the weekend miserable, though it might not be a bad idea to overhaul the organizational system while the kids are home with you!

I do try to make sure they have some appealing options that they are missing if it becomes a habit. One year when the kids were younger, we had a friday ice cream run. I knew the kids would scramble to be able to go. having a set event helped to motivate the children, and get them to wrap up school at a decent time for me.

Does It Work? Yes!

Before this system, I was battling, begging, ranting and still work was not getting done. We sat down and had a meeting. I lined out their school and chore expectations and was clear about what would happen if these were not done by an appointed checkout time. It took exactly TWO missed football games for my kids to start making sure their work was done by Thursday!

We created a lot of peace in our home by learning to be more organized. You can find our favorite homeschool organization ideas in this blog post and listen to the NEW In Due Season Homeschool podcast episode.

Laminate Important Homeschool Paper

We have a weekly schedule that the kids use to stay on task. You can grab it FREE here. I found that printing their homeschool planner for the day was always a hold up on busy Mondays. We rewrote it to be fillable and laminated ONE copy for each student in our homeschool. This helped reduce paper in our homeschool in a huge way. They can fill in the blanks with the chapter or pages read. After our check out meeting on Friday, they simply erase the marks from this week and are ready to start again on Monday. 

What are your Sources of Homeschool Paper?

Take a look at your homeschool bins, boxes or file folders. This will help you see where the source of the most paper is coming from. You can get creative using some of these tips to reduce the amount of waste, clutter, overwhelm and redundancy.

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Do you have a great tip? Leave me a DM on your favorite social channel @200fingersandtoes

PS. One last tip. I have used Chatbooks for my photo printing. If ART and PORTFOLIO papers are a source of the paper pile, a simple idea is to take great pictures and keep them in an album on your phone or computer. At the end of the school year you can print an anthology of your child’s or your whole homeschool work for under $15. The books are beautiful and they even have a child-proof paper option. They stack up beautifully and are one of my favorite things to put out when we host family gatherings. (not an affiliate link – just a fun tip!)