I have been using printables in our homeschool since the beginning of our homeschool journey. They are a handy tool no matter the stage you are in your homeschool, your curriculum choice, or the ages of your children. Printable organization can be overwhelming no matter how long you have been using them, let’s solve that problem right now!
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How to Store Your Printables
The first question is: what kind of printables are you storing? Worksheet printables are most likely going to be used and placed into binders or wherever you store your children’s to-be-done work or completed work.
For us, that’s binders. Once a month I would print out, or move lessons from our curriculum binder to each child’s binder for the coming month. At the same time, I would decide on what work I would keep for their portfolio and what work would be recycled.
For printables that I have gotten with a curriculum that are not consumable, I use a photo storage box. This is where I store our clip cards, our fraction pieces, our flashcards that came with our Grammar Galaxy curriculum, and such.
This photo storage box means that everything has its own space. Each set gets a smaller box for storage that you can label in your own way, that fits into the large storage box. I like that I can take one small box with us for lessons out of the house or to a different room instead of taking everything with us.
Printable Organization for Planning Ahead
Are you a big planner? Maybe you want to get everything printed off at one time but you don’t want to fill binders and overwhelm your kids. I get it, we liked having small binders without a lot of papers in them, it doesn’t look so intimidating.
File boxes might be the way you want to store them. You can print everything off, and then file them according to when you are going to use them, monthly, per subject, different colors, or whatever planning system works best for you.
You can totally reuse this system year to year, or replace the complete worksheets to use the file box as a storage/work sample portfolio for the year.
Finding what works for you can be trial and error, especially when you first start using printables more and more.