Where Do I Put All My Homeschool Stuff: Tip #2 A Crate for Each Student

Tip #2 Collect each child's notebooks, texts, and other materials into his or her own crate


This is such a simple tip, but it has worked so well for us for more than a dozen years, I thought I should include it.

We tried various ways to corral the necessary papers, books, binders, and other things each child needed for school, but nothing worked terribly well until we began using individual crates. It seemed that math books were particularly likely to sprout feet and walk away when we were trying to put them away in the lovely antique school desks my parents gave every child. And when I kept the current crop of workbooks on a bookshelf in the schoolroom, every day we had to re-sort out whose were whose. Finally we bought a milk crate for each student (even the preschoolers) and the daily search and sort parties came to a halt. Later we replaced the plastic crates with these wooden ones a friend was discarding.

My children outgrow the need for a crate by the time they are in junior or certainly senior high when they move to using desks in their own rooms, so now I have only two still using school crates. The third wooden container is for library books.

Why do I like the crates so much?

1. Everyone knows exactly where to put his books when he is finished with them for the day.
   Plus when I find a stray book, I know where to toss it.

2. Presorted for each child.

3. Easily portable!
    Most of the time the crates stay in our kitchen desk nook area. But in rare times when we need to move to another location, it is easy to do so. Years ago when I was on bedrest with my last pregnancy, the children all brought their crates up to my bedroom for us to do school together. And this past week when we had tile setters working in much of our main floor, we again brought the boxes upstairs.

There you go! School crates may not be what everyone needs, but they have been a huge help in our family!