Unboxing BookShark and Not Getting Overwhelmed

Unboxing your new curriculum can be overwhelming, but I don’t want you to feel that way. Instead, I want you to enjoy it and love every second of unboxing BookShark curriculum. Waiting for you to unbox it, put it away, and get started using it. But that box is full to the point of overwhelming.

Unboxing BookShark Not Getting overwhelmed

Unboxing BookShark and Not Getting Overwhelmed

*This post may contain affiliate links. I wrote this post in exchange for the curriculum we received to facilitate the review. All opinions are 100% my own.*

Opening your box of curriculum

Although my children are excited about the new books when that box first arrives, I don’t open it right away. I let my kids wander off and forget about it. I wait to open the box until they are doing something else that has all of their attention. That way I can see what is coming out of our BookShark curriculum box without losing something like one of my children runs off with a new book that they want to look at, I get to check it off as arrived and I know that it’s somewhere in our house after our kids have been looking through them all summer.

The first thing I do is grab a few things:

And then I open the box. I take in all that new book smell because I’m weird like that and love the smell of books.

Once I have the box unpacked and spread out over my kitchen island, I grab my pen and the list of what is supposed to be in the box and check it off. I want to make sure that everything is there. Then it’s time to find a place to put the books. Not everyone is willing to just put them on a shelf and let their kids read them ahead of schedule, but that’s how I do it because books are meant to be read and can be read more than once.

Where do you put it all?

I have two cubes on our cube storage shelf that is full of books for this coming school year, so they are all together. They can take one to read as long as it gets returned to that shelf. I have the remaining four cubes for other books of similar interest, those that we used last year and will be using again this year, and for our hands-on manipulates for science and math.

What do you do with the binder and all the instruction manuals?

For me, I use the 3 inch D-ring BookShark binder and dividers for our science and history curriculum. I get smaller, individual binders for their language arts because each of my children is working at a different level. I recommend at least 1 1/2 inch binders. I have gotten my curriculum early enough that I’m not rushing to get everything done all at once.

Unboxing BookShark Not Getting overwhelmed

Set it aside and forget it

Besides the great books that BookShark uses in its curriculum, my favorite thing is that once you get your box, you can basically set it aside and forget about it until you are ready to start your school year. BookShark has covered the planning for you so don’t have to worry about how you’ll get through all the books. As you can see below and more here, they take care of figuring out the heavy part of planning, when to read each chapter, when to practice spelling and more.

If you choose to not let your kids look at the books ahead of time, setting them somewhere that you can just grab the ones you need as scheduled might be easier, you won’t have to hunt down books when you need them.

We really enjoy BookShark for the content of the curriculum and the open-and-go style that it lends to parents with everything planned out for you.

Some of the subjects we have used have included:
Science for 6-8-year-olds and for 9-12-year-olds
History
Language Arts

What do you do when you receive your boxed curriculum?

Similar posts that you may be interested in:

BookShark is Secular Homeschool Curriculum

Homeschool Scheduling Made Easy with BookShark