Guest Post- Favorite Homeschooling Gadgets

{Today’s guest post is from Betty at Peace Creek on the Prairie.   If you’re a homeschooling mom and have never visited her blog, I’d encourage you to head over there and take a look around.  Her post today is a conglomeration of some of her favorite homeschool gadgets and how she currently uses them or plans to use them in the upcoming school year.}

As a homeschool mom, I tend to look at things through a different window.  Many times that window seems small, as in, €œI need more space€.   Other times, I am just trying to make do with what I have, but need to get ultra creative.

I love lists, and I love checking them off, but what do you do with them afterwards? I am not one to keep piles of paper€”or maybe I am, but I don€™t like them lying around. I am tired of buying binders for them, they are bulky, heavy and don€™t really fit neatly on bookshelves, since they are not €œsquare€.  So, this leads me to one of my newest gadgets.

A couple of weeks ago, an opportunity came up for me to get a comb binder.  I scrambled over ideas of how I could use it for.  Here is my list:

• Instead of using file folders for my lapbooks, I can make Topic Centered books and bind them together.  We will put all parts of our lapbooks on cardstock, like we did on our file folders.
• All those recipes that I never get in a three ring binder, can be bound with my comb binder.
• My children€™s notebooking pages, copywork, coloring and such, can all go in a book for them.
• I can put my husband€™s instructions for mechanical things that I have printed for him, and make a book for him.
• Pages and Ideas from my favorite magazines can be bound together.
• My lesson plans, reading record, lesson logs, and so forth will have a book.

My list goes on, but you can see how this will make a bit of a difference.  For our chore lists, I plan to make morning, afternoon, and evening sections, and bind them into a book.  Each day will have a listing under the different times of day.  They will all be laminated and able to have a dry or wet erase marker used on them. The cool thing about my comb binder is I can add pages easily, very much like a three ring binder.

My next gadget is our wall sized dry erase board.

I use this board for so many things.  During school for math problems, reading troubled word families, sentence diagramming, spelling words, assignments and so forth.  I use it at night to leave my husband instructions for warming up his meal if he has been out in the field and didn€™t want to stop long enough for me to bring him food.  On Saturdays, we do our home blessing.  I list all chores that must be completed on Friday evening.  Though I like to keep up during the week, we just don€™t, so on Saturday we get it all done.

Another gadget I love is my laptop.

From making my own homeschool forms, to making worksheets, downloading unit studies, and watching movies, my laptop is now an essential part of our homeschool.  I am also a new member of the TOS Homeschool Review Crew.  I will be reviewing homeschool related products on my blog.

My other gadgets are things that most of you probably use.  Three ring binders for various papers, again, before my comb binder, I used these a lot.  Things that are already in a binder will stay, as they are hole punched. Now, I won€™t be buying so many though. 😉  staplers, tape, double sided tape, pens in various colors, mechanical pencils, paper cutter, dry erase marker, in different colors, binder clips, sharpies, three hole punch, singe hole punch, and so forth.  There are so many uses for these items.  I like to use colored pens for grading; I use my child€™s favorite color to grade their papers.

Being able to have and use the above gadgets has helped our family be more creative with our homeschool curriculum.  We use many of these items for our unit studies.  One of my next items of want is a laminator.  However, for now, I either take my things into Office Max during their Teacher Appreciation Days or use contact paper.

What gadgets help you in your homeschool?

Betty