Organizing Tips
An organized home may seem impossible when you have kids around all day long, but it can be done. Here are tips and ideas that will help your household run smoothly.
Resources
Organizing Plain and Simple: A Ready Reference Guide With Hundreds Of Solutions to Your Everyday Clutter Challenges
Desk drowning in papers? No room for the car in the garage? Santa still sitting on the roof in May? A less-is-more philosophy is great, but we all still have way too much stuff. The home office swallows up whole rooms, as does the family computer station. Then there's the home gym, the TV room, and the playroom, not to mention our collections - books, CDs, toys. Time management experts agree that when the minor things that take up space in the mind are eliminated, there is room to think about the big things. The same goes for the home. The visual clarity that comes from de-cluttering rooms, finances, and time promotes mental clarity, peacefulness, and contemplation. When everything is organized, it is easier to enjoy the meaningful things in life.

Organizing Plain & Simple is like a course from an expert teacher, grounded in the fundamentals and enriched with philosophy, tips, anecdotes, illustrations - everything necessary to make home and life run more smoothly. Donna Smallin takes a personalized, nonjudgemental approach to explaining how to assess each individual's situation and suggesting where to start organizing - room by room - and then covers how to stay organized. Then she offers advice on organizing time and finances, as well as organizing for the seasons and for special events - the birth of a baby, combining households, a move, kids going off to college, successful downsizing. Smallin presents a broad range of innovative solutions in the running feature "One Challenge, Three Solutions" that includes tips for solving classic organizational issues from a wide range of professional organizers.

Unclutter Your Home: 7 Simple Steps, 700 Tips & Ideas (Simplicity Series)
Hundreds of practical ideas for sorting, evaluating, and getting rid of all those material items that get in the way of a simplified lifestyle.
Home Organizing Workbook: Clearing Your Clutter, Step-By-Step
Failing the Mary Poppins' snap-the-fingers approach to cleaning, here's the next best thing: an utterly practical handbook that offers lasting results for anyone looking to banish clutter from every room in the house. Home organizer par excellence Meryl Starr offers up her hardworking organizing solutions in The Home Organizing Workbook, a straightforward guide to getting organized. The room chapters begin with targeted questionnaires that help the reader identify specific organizational problems, followed by hundreds of hardworking solutions and strategic maintenance tips. Those itching to get started can dive right in with step-by-step organizing projects ranging from quick-and-easy weeknight jobs, like overhauling the spice cabinet, to more intensive endeavors such as reorganizing the bedroom closet. Accessory lists at the end of each chapter feature dozens of the best products available, from lazy susans to shelf dividers, and explain exactly how they can be used to optimum effect in each room, while the extensive resource list shows where to get them. It's a package as tidy as its solutions: concealed Wire-O lay-flat binding, tabbed chapters to take readers straight to their problem area du jour, and full-color, solution-oriented photographs sure to inspire action. Ready to clear that clutter and keep it that way? The Home Organizing Workbook is the ultimate guide to preserving open spaces.
The Well-Ordered Home: Organizing Techniques for Inviting Serenity into Your Life
Organizing the home is one of those desirable and beneficial activities that remain elusive for many. This practical guide explains the many benefits - physical, emotional, and spiritual - of an organized home and shows how to attain them. Breaking down the process into 50 steps, the author uses her own experiences as a psychologist and professional home organizer to help readers clear away not only the physical clutter but the psychological blocks that encourage it and hinder organization. She tells where to start, encourages small steps, and explores the psychology of organizing. Next she addresses fundamental principles, including keeping tools where they will be used and making the most of active storage space. Finally, she shows how to get rid of excess stuff, including how to attack those never-ending piles and junk drawers, and stem the inflow of junk into the home. These easy exercises, tips, and stories will truly help readers organize their homes for efficiency, peacefulness, and well-being.
Conquering Chronic Disorganization
The real-life stories of chronically disorganized people and the ground breaking, easy-to-learn organizing methods used to end their chronic disorganization in the area of residential clutter, office organizing, paper management, storage, and time management. Conquerings pages includes an extensive index, user-friendly summaries, quick tips, helpful photographs, and a resource section of products and organizations.
The Organizing Sourcebook : Nine Strategies for Simplifying Your Life

The nine habits of highly organized people

Organizing consultant Kathy Waddill demonstrates how the simple act of being organized can improve your quality of life. In The Organizing Sourcebook, she presents nine organizing principles that can easily be applied to any situation, activity, or environment. The book gives you the tools for managing time; decreasing stress; and dealing with cultural, personal, and emotional change. Case histories illustrate how each strategy solved a specific problem.

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook
If you are thinking about homeschooling, or are struggling with a educational homeschooling curriculum that is difficult to use, let Dr. Ray and Dorothy Moore show you how to make homeschooling an easy-to-live-with family adventure in learning. This low-stress, low-cost program shows you how to build a curriculum around your child's needs and interests - and around a realistic family schedule. Instead of a cut-and-dried approach, you'll discover the freedom of a flexible program that encourages creativity and initiative.
One Thing at a Time : 100 Simple Ways to Live Clutter-Free Every Day
Simple, effective ways to put things in their place

Those piles of papers, clothes, and other things you thought you'd successfully de-cluttered have returned, and this time they brought friends. What's the use of trying to fight the clutter? Is there a better way?

This powerful and useful guide delivers solutions that work, no matter how overwhelmed you feel. The answer isn't an elaborate new system, or a solemn vow to start tomorrow. Instead, psychotherapist and organizer Cindy Glovinsky shares 100 simple strategies for tackling the problem the way it grows--one thing at a time. Here's a sampling of the tips explained in the book:

*Declare a fix-it day
*Purge deep storage areas first
*Label it so you can read it
*Get a great letter opener
*Practice toy population planning
*Leave it neater than you found it
Written in short takes and with a supportive tone, this is an essential, refreshing book that helps turn a hopeless struggle into a manageable part of life, one thing at a time.
Help for the Harried Homeschooler : A Practical Guide to Balancing Your Child's Education with the Rest of Your Life
Homeschooling moms and dads can be overwhelmed by the demands on their time. Between their children’s educational needs; their roles as spouse, parent, and more; and their own individual desires and goals, these mothers and fathers struggle to accomplish all that must be done. In Help for the Harried Homeschooler, experienced homeschooler, author, and mother of four Christine Field offers sound advice for parents who want not only to achieve homeschooling success but also to reach a balance in their lives.
Organizing Tips & Ideas
Organized Living
Find out how to manage life so it doesn't manage you. Organized-Living.com is a rich resource of information, tips, and advice to help create organized lifestyles for the home and workplace.
Fly Lady
If you are suffering from CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome), then this is the place for you. Start with Babysteps and learn to set up routines, get rid of clutter, and put your home and life in order. Once you join up with the Fly Lady, you'll receive daily emails filled with FLYing Lessons to guide you through the organization maze.
School Room Organization for a Big Family
There are so many benefits to having a large family, too numerous to count. However, one of the very few disadvantages is that a mom has to really stay on top clutter, particularly a homeschooling mom! It can be challenging to find a spot for everything. Organization is key when school six children.
Keepers at Home Organizer
A binder system for the Christian mother. Covers all the facets of homemaking including grocery lists, errands, goals, correspondence, and more. Provides for planning home maintenance, meals, bible study, and medical checkups. Includes a special section for homeschooling planning.
Organizing the Large Family Homeschool
This article offers a smattering of simple ideas to help keep homeschooling materials organized.
Homeschool Planning for a Large Family
Homeschool planning for a large family can seem daunting. From choosing curriculum to setting up a daily schedule, there are seemingly endless decisions to be made. The good news is that you can simplify the homeschool planning process. The key is to prioritize your goals before you begin planning.
Home School Organizer
A binder system with logs and forms that can be customized to suit your family's needs. This system can be used for multiple children and offers a simple way to meet any applicable state record keeping requirements.
OrganizedHome.com
This website has a wealth of information on running a smooth and organized home. Includes articles, recipes, organizing tips, message boards, and much more. You'll also find information on creating your own household notebook, along with free printable forms to organize all the information your family needs.
Large Family Workbox System for Homeschool
An example of an organizational system for a large homeschool family.
Homeschool Reporting Online
Whether you are an individual family needing a convenient record keeping solution, an umbrella school, homeschool co-op or support group desiring to reduce administrative overhead, Homeschool Reporting Online offers online software solutions. They offer simple, secure online record keeping and offsite electronic storage and backup of student records.
How Do I Get Organized?
Getting Organized Part 3
Staying organized is much easier if everything is in its proper place. Details the use of plastic bins to aid in organization of your home school.
How Do I Keep Organized?
Tips for using calendars, binders, notebooks, and a weekly assignment record to organize your homeschool. Although this article is specific to one curriculum, there are some useful general tips.
A Real Mom's Home School
In her article, "A Real Mom's Home School," Maggie Hogan admits that "planning ahead and staying organized are not my strong suits." She shares ten tips that she's learned the hard way for balancing home and homeschooling, along with inspiring tips on juggling meal preparation, babies and toddlers, and more.
Conquering Clutter
Clutter can make a person feel less able to put things into proper perspective, or prioritize important tasks. Stacks of paper are usually formed out of a person's indecision on what to do with some piece of information, or out of fear to put something away because they may want to act on it "later." This article lists some simple steps to take to get rid of clutter.
Conquering Kids Clutter
A guide to managing and conquering the clutter in kids' rooms.
Getting Organized Part 2
More organizing tips from Katherine Von Duyke. How to use Velcro, slip-in report covers, and large plastic containers to tame your homeschool supplies.
Home is Cool: Get Organized for Home School
Homeschool families, like Tolstoy’s happy ones, are all alike: drowning in a sea of clutter. Home schooling a child beats all other organizational challenges hands-down. How do you count the clutter? The books. The papers. The biology experiments on the kitchen window. The six-foot-tall child sprawled on the floor, reading. The record-keeping. College admissions and testing and letters from the correspondence school.
Organizing Your Homeschool Day
If clutter and outside activities are taking over your life, you need a plan and some routine in your life. Get tips on how to plan and prioritize your work, and to respond appropriately with flexibility when life gets hectic.
Getting Organized Part 1
This article includes great organization tricks and tips for getting organized, including organizing around themes, how less is more, how to plan in blocks of time, and a discussion of storage solutions.
The Big Clean Up
Stacy DeBroff shares 15 favorite get-organized secrets, allowing you to declutter with ease.
Online Support Groups
Sidetracked Home Executive...In Touch Forum
Join the fun as sidetrackers from all over commune to help each other get organized. Along the way, we have a lot of laughs and make a lot of friends.
Organize-to-Homeschool
Homeschoolers face tremendous demands on their organizational skills. Frequently creative, hardworking, and goal oriented, they must manage the home, other children, teaching, and the many other demands of a stay-at-home parent. This board is designed to offer support, find solutions, and discuss troublesome situations. Although there are many aspects to homeschooling, the focus, the only focus, of this board is solving organizational problems related to home schooling. This group is a part of the Messies Anonymous website.
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Featured Resources

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Understanding Waldorf Education : Teaching from the Inside Out
Written by a teacher with more than 25 years of experience, this book offers a jargon-free view of Waldorf schools with their philosophy of the importance of a three-dimensional education. Through learning experiences that involve all of the senses, children use a variety of intelligences to develop thought, feeling, and intentional, purposeful activity. Whether you_re a Waldorf parent or teacher, or you just want to learn more about these innovative educational concepts, this book contains impo...
Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-Fives
For the first time, Basic Montessori opens the celebrated philosophy and method to a more general public. David Gettman has devised a clear and modern explanation of Montessori's revolutionary ideas about early intellectual development, and provides a step-by-step guide to the Montessori learning activities most commonly used with under-fives. These include activities for introducing reading and writing, counting and decimal concepts, science, and geography, as well as activities that help dev...
A Twaddle-Free Education: An Introduction to Charlotte Mason's Timeless Educational Ideas
Are you disappointed with dumbed-down reading material (“twaddle”) written for children? Do you wish for your children to feast their hearts and minds on noble ideas, fine art, and great literature? Are you hoping your children gain an appreciation of nature and a deep understanding of natural sciences? Most importantly, do you want your children to develop a lifetime love of learning? If you answered “yes,” you may discover a Charlotte Mason-inspired twaddle-free education is just what you’ve b...
Homeschooling Essentials: A Practical Guide to Getting Started
If you're ready to begin homeschooling, then the experiences of others can offer valuable help and encouragement as you jump into this new adventure. This practical guide answers common questions, helps you navigate the legalities of homeschooling, talks about the practical side of homeschooling and different methods, offers resources and gives advice about high school. 
LeapPad Game - Mind Wars Jr. Interactive Game
Bring a friend and try this brand new way to play with your LeapPad! Race around the board in this fast-paced, wonderfully wacky game. Be the first to close all five windows and you will become the Mind Wars master and learn important 1st and 2nd grade skills in math, language arts, life science, physical science, and social studies!