Keeping My Home School 6th Grader Organized

We will be starting our third year homeschooling this July. This past year we lost papers and our list of assignments that we wrote down. Thankfully, I also keep digital copies or our plans.

Since we are having a break between 5th and 6th grade, I brainstormed ideas that I hope will help keep everything together and organized. My plan is also to help give him more independence by giving him his assignments for the entire week instead of the day.

I have my planner that I will share at another time that is now planned out till September.

I purchased him a planner from Target. It is a 2020-21 Weekly/Monthly Planner from Blue Sky. It starts in July, which is perfect.

The monthly part of his calendar I have added important dates and figured he can go in and add anything he wants with it.

In the weekly part, I listed his assignments for the week on the correct day. We are only going to home school Monday - Thursday, leaving Friday's open for co-op, trips to visit family, field trips, or catch up days. Every Sunday or Monday morning I will update his planner with the new assignments.

I do not have his language arts in his planner yet, I need to dive more into the curriculum calendar for that before I add it. (You can read more about our curriculum choice for 6th grade HERE)

Another way I am helping him stay organized is he will have a folder system that has all the papers he needs for the week in their assigned day. I did a post yesterday on how I created this folder system.

I didn't take any photos, but his completed work will go into a regular 3 ring binder to make setting up his portfolio at the end of the year. I will add his work to that just to help keep myself organized and less work at the end of the year.

How do you keep your family organized? I am always looking for more ideas!

Our 6th Grade Curriculum at a Glance

We haven't started 6th grade yet. We will start in July! However, I have taken this mini-break from school to focus on what curriculum we have decided to go with for 6th grade.

Please note, there are no affiliate or referral links in this post. This is just the choice we are using.

I have decided to do Level 6 of Build Your Library. We really like this curriculum. However, I wish it was slightly meatier so I will be creating mini unit studies on the books, interactive notebooks, and note booking. We haven't done any official type of note booking in our home school yet but I do want to include more writing. I will be either creating my own, using teachers pay teachers, or finding free resources online from other wonderful families. I read Emily is going to be updating level 6 and that should be out by the fall time. We will be using the current version just because it aligns well with the older version of level 5. I do want to do a weekly update when we start school, so you can follow along with what we are doing and what I added.

We also will be using Teaching Textbooks for math. My son and I both really enjoy the online set up of it.

We have yet to find a writing/grammar curriculum that we like, so this year we are trying Essentials in Writing.

We are not a real fan of the Real Science Odyssey, so this year we are going to try something new. My son wants to learn about Earth and Space. I have heard good things about this curriculum so I thought we would try it out. We decided on Elemental Science: Earth Science & Astronomy for the Logic Stage.

I am also going to add TeaTime. My goal is once a week in some sort of variety to fun to basic. He will also be doing a free typing program I found. Watching that boy type hurts my soul, so I would like him to have some basic typing skills.

This is our 6th-grade choice in a nutshell.

What curriculum will you be using this year? What is your child's favorite book? (I am always looking for new books to give to my kiddo to read)