Preparing for a New Homeschool Year | Cleaning Out and Updating Decor

[Music] for the first time this summer I've started to think about the next school year and I started by just cleaning out some bookshelves going to my kids work boxes cleaning them out and doing a little bit of a spruce up in some of the rooms where we do a lot of our homeschooling join me for another day in the life not take us long to crush [Music] we're still in summer mode around here but I knew this week that I needed to spend a little time thinking about school and for me the best place to start is to just clean everything out spruce up the room a little bit make things look fresh and nice and pretty a place that draws us in and makes everyone excited about learning again we have these beautiful zenas and maragold that I planted in a couple of pots around the house and they're just striking this time of year and so I cut a couple of them I knew that starting with something beautiful like flowers when I have a big job ahead of me of cleaning out the kids work boxes and our bookshelves I knew that something beautiful like this was just the place place to start to give me the excitement about doing the big job ahead of me if you're new here my name is Sherry I the creator of the blog and YouTube channel our life homeschooling where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms I bring you along with me in our day-to-day work of homeschooling our kids I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids I'm married to my high school sweetheart for 24 years I love encouraging other moms on my YouTube Channel today I'm going to be giving this room a little touchup it needs a mother's love the kids do chores every day in here and they do a pretty good job of picking up but our bookshelves every now and then I just need to go through them and reorganize the books this is where we do a lot of school um and so I I just sometimes like to start by making it pretty change out some wall decor um I'm adding some plants this year and I also one big job I I need to go through the kids work boxes this is where we store all of their supplies most of the kids have three work boxes Reading Writing and math and that's where they keep all their belongings that they use every day I just like to take a little bit of time when we start a new school year to just completely clean out and make the space look a little nicer give them something fresh to look at um something that's going to inspire me Inspire them as well my husband won this beautiful antique chest at an auction and I love it but I can't decide if it's too big for this room or not so I'm going to be moving a couple things around and trying to decide if it's going to stay or go even if we don't decide to keep it it might be something nice to just switch for now and just do something a little different in here and maybe later on if I don't feel like it's a great fit I can move it back to how it was you can see our bookshelves are in a little disarray here the kids do they're supposed to organize these every day Whoever has this room as their chore I'm supposed to be checking it it just needs a little bit of help this little area on top of this mantle piece is some place that I like to display books but it also needs a touchup I need to clean it off add some new things here so we'll see what happens with this some more bookshelves that need organized and these are the kids work boxes now don't judge you all know you have places in your house like this as well these work boxes right here my kids are still using during the summer because they're reading books and then they just shove them in their reading work box till it's overflowing like this you can also see I have tabs on all the top work boxes that's because our 18-month-old has take pulled all the other ones off so I'm going to have to find them and maybe make some new ones and refresh those we don't have a specific School room where we do all our work our kids are pretty much spread throughout the house some of them in the dining room at the table or at the island in the kitchen they'll be here in the living room or in the other room across the hallway there um we I I want our home to be the seat of all learning I want what we do in our home school to to just mesh with life in such a way that it's really kind of hard to distinguish between the two and I think that's pretty much how it is in our school when we start back to our book workk in at the end of August um it does Mark something new it's a distinction from the rest of the year the kids do get excited about starting their school workor again but our lifestyle has become one where we're constantly learning or producing and so um it's really not all that much of a change for us one thing I've wanted to add to this room this year is some more indoor plants so I found this pot this hanging pot at the Goodwill for a cheap and then I put some nice plants in that I have some new plants on the window sill and um I'm hoping to add a few more here I am starting to take apart my kids work box boxes now at the end of the school year I did have them clean these out but they continue to use them all summer just stuffing all their little trinkets that they find um any books they're reading they just put in there I just wanted to thoroughly clean them out when I was cleaning them out I found a couple of things that we've been missing this year every time one of my kids we get to the geometry section in their Math workbooks they um they couldn't find any of our protractors we had we had just one originally but it got lost so we went out and bought another one and I kept we couldn't find them so we just kept buying more and I found three of them in afton's math work box so we learned who is hiding all the protractors cleaning out these work boxes was kind of a big job you can't really see all of it on just a short YouTube clip but my method was to just empty everything get everything out of the work boxes wipe them clean with a wipe put them all back empty and then I took that pile of all the books and papers and everything put it in a box and set it aside so I can just slowly go through it that way having just an empty workbox stand um just it seems more manageable to me than taking the time to put everything away in every workbox um that would just take a lot of time it's kind of fun looking through some of their workbooks here's a little watercolor brenley did and the older kids workbooks are neater or work boxes are neater than the younger ones here here she's working on writing her own music so it's fun to just see little surprises like this I did find a collection of these labels a lot of them and a whole bunch of pencils now the one other thing that I have done to prepare for our new homeschool year is to put together all of our morning time work and I've done this in the simple morning time notebook that you can find on the blog I'll leave the link below this morning time notebook has been a great way to simplify our home school another thing that I bought that I'm going to be putting in this room I bought some new wall art these are some vintage posters um I [Music] got this one is some trees I've had one that's all some James aabon Birds some drawings he did it's really pretty I've had had that one for a while but um I just wanted to get some different ones up my kids love nature anything to do with nature so we have this trees one this one is some wild flowers mushrooms this will be interesting we haven't really studied that much about mushrooms so that's why I know just having these on the walls the kids will stand and look at them and want to find out more about them and the last one is some butterflies I really like how they're made out of kind of like a cloth material so um I'm not loving the the black plastic up top my other one has more of a wood on the top which I really like so I can always change that in the future if I decide to but for now this is what's going up today that we made like oh or um that one kind of does not really at all oh yeah that's their Christmas tree and those are the cups right there the yellow ones green cracking oh no those are their horns I'm on [Music] and I've had a couple people ask me about the stand that we keep our work boxes in it's something my husband made so I can't give you a link for it unfortunately it's custom made um I bought the work boxes themselves at Ikea several years ago I'm not even sure if they still sell them but this has been a great fit for us we have three work boxes there are a lot of the labels I found um in everyone's work boxes and I was able to put those back on most of the kids have three work boxes Reading Writing and math because that covers a lot of the independent work they do for a kindergartener sometimes I'll just give them one work box cuz all their stuff fits in one and then some of our older kids might have something extra just with some of the other classes that they're taking our science we do all together and some of our history um some of the other kids do online history through Veritas press and then all of the rest of our school subjects are covered in morning time so reading writing and math are enough work boxes for what we need organizing our books is something that is a constant job around here our kids read a lot and so this always needs to be updated and I'm always putting things back where they belong after I clean out some of our school spaces the next thing I'll have on my list of things to do is to start making up the kids checklist so that takes a little bit of time looking ahead to what I want to do with each of them with my older kids asking them what they want to do and just sitting down and writing each child's plan out for the mantle that um had some of these books and I had some decor here this really had kind of Fallen apart and it's dirty and I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do here so I started by wiping it down really well and I took down that mirror it's been there for a while I really love it but I felt like it needed something else there and I ended up putting some more of those vintage posters up I did take a break to do one of my favorite things and that is read to the kids this was during quiet time when the babies were down and we're reading we're finishing up The Lion The Witch in the wardrobe which I've done before with my older kids but some of these younger ones haven't heard it yet reading to the kids is one of the things that I have kept up during the summer I haven't done it every day but consistently a couple of days of week um I think it really helps them to stay reading to stay interested in stories it's some great time that I have with them just sitting down and talking to them usually we're snuggling together on the sofa back to this corner with the mantle we found a swallow tail caterpillar and that seemed like the perfect thing to put there I found an old chalkboard a wreath and some flowers and now it looks clean and pretty I am really happy with just the little touchup that we did in this room um I think it's just going to give us a great place to start cleaning out this room did take me a little bit of time in fact my kids were helping me sort through that box and I'll probably still be sorting through that box of stuff for the next week but I am so happy with how it turned out I hope that by joining me today in all the work I did in this room will inspire you as you begin thinking about a new homeschool year I know some of you homeschool year round I hope this inspires you if you liked this content I encourage you to take a look at the video I did last week on five things that we prioritize in our home school I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms have a great week [Music]