Organizing Bigger-Motherjoy

[Gwenny]

Motherjoy:
In another thread you were going to do this for Bigger, did you end up doing that? How did it work? Anything you would change?

"I'm creating a spiral notebook for each quarter that contains every page needed, except for the artistic expressions pages we do once a week. Those creations will be photocopied or photographed and glued to a page each week. Each week has a science notebook page, history notebook page, copy of the poem, lined page for copying, science experiment page, lined pages for grammar and spelling. Plus I will have the math workbooks cut apart and hole-punched and those will be included in the spiral notebook.plus ETC and some extra critical thinking worksheets we have hanging around."

[glperky]

Wow, that sounds like a great idea.

[Motherjoy]

Hey there.

Yes, I did use the notebooks this year. There were pros and cons, and I'll tell you my experience.

The pros were having all the material in one place. Each boy had four notebooks, one for each quarter. They enjoyed finishing up each notebook and starting a new one. Another pro is that its easy to keep all of their work. I just dump the notebooks in boxes when done.

The cons were that the notebooks didn't hold up well. Sometime before the end of each quarter, the back cover of the notebooks fell off. They got lots of use, and it shows. They are definately not pretty show pieces by the end. If you could find a stronger binding method, that might help. I just had them spiral bound with the plastic covers from Staples. Another con is the cost. I made lots of copies and that added up quickly. Plus the cost of binding four books times three kids. The last negative is that a few times the kids wanted to get ahead in math or phonics. Since each week/unit had the planned pages included, they would often be working in three different weeks, one for history and science, one for phonics and one for math. Though, this isn't a huge deal, and they just flip back and forth as needed.

For one of the books, I messed up the order of the math pages, and I couldn't figure out why my son was struggling so much. Well, he had jumped from Singapore 2a to Singapore 3a, because I had put the wrong order of pages in. silly.

I probably would not do this again, honestly, unless I could come up with a better way of binding it. even then, I'm not sure I would do it.

[Gwenny]

Thanks for replying! That is very helpful. I love hearing about what works and what didn't for others. The posts about setting up each guide are great and would be helpful if more of us said what we have found that works or wasn't so great. I just finished Preparing with one of my daughters and I used one giant 3-ring binder with page protectors. That was not a good plan. Way too big and bulky, pages going everywhere. I definitely am setting up the other guides differently and will not do that again.

Thanks again!