Organizing Our Schoolroom

After thinking about it (and then avoiding it for a while), I finally started to go through our schoolroom yesterday.  I still had projects hanging all over the white board, from the ceiling and stuck to the closet doors.  Plus, all their schoolwork didn't quite get put away in the rush to declare the year officially over.

Unfortunately, I'm not done quite yet, but I did get a dent in yesterday.  I also found some direction.  I haven't been exactly sure how to organize our curriculum, supplies and finished school work and while I'm sure this will adjust every year until I find the perfect system, I've found ours for now.

I found these bins a few weeks ago at Wal-Mart and they seemed like they'd be the perfect size to store all our "not currently using, but I'm going to need again" curriculum.  They ended up working pretty darn good.  In fact, I need to go get a couple more.

This particular bin is a Rubbermaid Cleverstore in the 32 qt size.  Here's a link to them at Wal-mart, although I'm sure you can find them at a lot of different stores.  I like that it's almost the perfect size for our textbooks, but they aren't so big that you can't lift them once they're filled.  The only down side is that they are thinner plastic and I'm not certain how long they'll hold up.  I'd be more comfortable with Rubbermaid Roughneck, but I couldn't find the right size and for now, size is more important.

I decided to sort my curriculum by subject.  As I just finished my second year of homeschooling, I don't have too much in the way of curriculum to store just yet, so I do have multiple subjects in one bin.  As you can see, this bin has Language Arts, History and Latin. 

I have a second bin with all our science encyclopedias (they supplement our Science curriculum).  I thought about keeping them out, but I just don't have the room.  My compromise is that I'm going to keep the bin accessible so we can pull them out if the kids want to look something up. 

I'm thinking I can fit everything else in two more bins, one for Math and Science and the other for my kids old schoolwork.  In Utah, we aren't required to keep any schoolwork by law, but I feel more comfortable keeping at least one year.  I plan to purchase some giant binder clips so we can stick each child's work together.  I've thought about using rubber bands, but I'm a little worried about them losing their elasticity.

Once we finish sorting, I'll be all ready for next years curriculum.  Well, the schoolroom will be ready, I think we still need a little more summer before the rest of us will catch up.

How do you organize all your supplies?