How to organize notebooks if you’re a hopeless mess

I love notebooks, I have piles and piles of them all over the house.  I have ones for drawing, notebooks for Bible study, and notebooks for planning stuff.  They are all over my house.  For this post, I am dividing my notebooks into two types: mine and the kids.  Here’s a look at how we are organizing notebooks right now (this will change, I guarantee it, Future Ticia here, three years later and this is still essentially how I do it).

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Organizing MY Notebooks

My drawing notebook I put together using my Binding Machine* (Future Ticia here, I just bought a new binding machine because I wore out my old binding machine), it’s just a stack of cardstock cut in half, and bound together.  I eventually added on a cover of the different combinations of skin tones, laminated for durability.  It gets carried around in my pencil bag.  I include this notebook because I figure someone else might be an artist and trying to figure out what to do with their work.  Because I carry this EVERYWHERE, it is the notebook I am most likely to lose because I do not put it back where it goes (primarily because I don’t have a spot for it).  Future Ticia update:  I have since made another artist notebook bag that holds more pencils because I got a bigger pencil set, YES BIGGER, and I have found a spot to keep it in, but I don’t always put it back in that spot, oops).

After the pictures are done and scanned, they go into manila envelopes with the story labeled, and stored in a box on my shelf.  You can do the same thing for your student portfolio if you live in a state that requires a portfolio.  This would also allow you to get rid of papers, which in my house is our biggest mess.

My lesson plans are kept in a magazine box* in our calendar time area (you can see it sitting on top of the shelf in the calendar time post).  << Future Ticia, I have since updated our schooling area in a rework yet again of our materials, but I still keep them in the magazine box.

My home-planning notebook is frequently lost.  I carry it everywhere and use it to plan everything.  In it, I’ve got menu plans, my Sunday school plans, and blogging plans.  I keep trying to create a cleaning schedule, but it always self-destructs after a week, so that’s still on my someday (Future Ticia update, our current cleaning plan has each child responsible for a particular area).

FYI: the cover is just a piece of cardstock with scrapbook paper on it and laminated for durability.  It makes me happy to see the pretty lamination.

Organizing Student Notebooks

For our schoolwork we use a combination of notebooking and lapbooking.  The kids like opening and closing the folding elements on lapbooks, but they do not always like making them.  So, we compromise and some activities we use lapbooks and some we use notebook pages, and we use a fair amount of composition notebooks.

This produces a lot of notebooks made with my Binding Machine {still an affiliate link, still love it, but I’m not going to marry it}.

All of their notebooks go in the center drawer of their desk, only their notebooks.  As you can see, my plan hasn’t happened yet.  Right now there is random stuff in there as well.

Aside from their anatomy notebook, which I bought, all the rest are bound by my super awesome machine.  The cover is laminated card stock (a new addition this year after losing all of the covers last year).  The inside of the geography notebook is just blank pieces of card stock.  As we complete lapbook pages for different countries we glue them in.

If you don’t have a binding machine (why aren’t you getting one yet? They’re AWESOME!), then you could use a spiral notebook or composition notebook to glue it all in.

Or you could use a 3-ring binder with tabs, and add them in that way.  I have enough bad memories of getting fingers caught in the rings, and the rings breaking (I may or may not have played with them), that I don’t really plan on using them too much.

I am gathering up all of their notebooks from last year and storing them in a plastic file box.  Future Ticia here, after three years of doing this, they have to make choices of what they want to keep, and what they want to get rid of.  It forces them not to keep EVERYTHING, which they try to do.

More advice on organizing your homeschool

• My prior attempts at organization
• Organizing lesson plans
• Teaching reading to multiple levels
• Organizing notebooks (you are here)
• Your tips on homeschool and life organization
• The 20 Minutes Homeschool schedule
• Creating a block schedule for your homeschool