Shake, File, and Move

Posted by Aubrey Lively | 0 comments

Moving with kids is a little bit of a nightmare–in my case, a recurrent nightmare. We have moved five times in the last three years. Our latest move happened three weeks ago.

The usual advice for homeschooling moms on the move is to take time off from school. If you move as much as me, though, that time off can really stack up. In six years of homeschooling, we’ve moved six times, lost three relatives, welcomed two new babies, and remodeled a house. For this move, I was determined that school would not be derailed by chaos.

The chaos came. A car broke down, overtime had to be worked, a child drank hydrogen peroxide and threw up. Then by the day of the move, no one had responded to our ad for help, so we got an extra dolly, broke a bookshelf and the coffee pot (on accident), and lost all of somebody’s underwear. (I won’t say whose.) Eventually there were tears, delirious laughter, blood, and bruises. (Bookshelves fight back.)

School has continued through it all, thanks to a filing system introduced to me by Melanie Blair, a mom on the Well-Trained Mind boards.  Knowing how easily we get side-tracked in the nitty-gritty endless days, knowing how toddlers like to play in toilets and babies like to be fed, knowing the temptation to let them sneak off and play while I hide under the bed, knowing that we were likely moving again, the Container Store version of homeschooling got my attention.

It’s called “filing,” and it works like this: you get 42 hanging file folders, one for each week of a 36-week school year, and six more teacher folders to be headers for each six weeks. I like the header folders to be one color while the six weeks folders are other, alternating colors, so you can see each six weeks as a block of color.

Into each week’s hanging folder (labeled for that week), you insert a manila file folder for each child, also labeled for the corresponding week. So my Week 1 hanging folder holds three manila folders, all marked Week 1. The first one is labeled in green, the second in pink, and the last one, shared by my preschoolers, is labeled with a purple pen.

On the outside of each hanging file folder, I glued a library pocket and a paper CD sleeve. One is the perfect size for supply lists on index cards; the other is a great solution to CDs and computer discs that you don’t want to lose precious time hunting down.

Once your system is in place, you can begin making lesson plans. Mine are broken down by six weeks, and each six week plan for each subject goes into the teacher folders. During that six weeks, those plans will be hole-punched and put into my teacher notebook.

The kids’ folders contain all copies I need for each week. I also ripped up workbooks and filed the pages. Blank paper, index cards, paper plates, yarn–anything that we would need for that week that would fit reasonably well in the folders was filed. We don’t always keep paper plates around the house, but we had some when I was filing, and I knew where they were–a luxury I might not have after a move. The tissue paper had already been packed, but I knew which box it was in and pulled some out because I knew it could be another six months before I saw that box again. Each week, the contents of that week’s manila folder are moved to the kids’ working folders. All we have to do is empty the folder by Friday.

I store all of this OCD magic in a blue crate, which doesn’t have a lid. Pilfering fingers have only been caught rifling through Mama’s Wonderful Box once, but my husband walked into a hanging planter of strawberries, spilling dirt into all the crevices quite a few times. I managed to vacuum my files out safely, but you might want to think about a lid.Week One happened at the old house. Week two started there, on the floor after the dining table had been disassembled, and was finished in the new house the following week. Time lost? Half a week on each end of the move. Not bad at all.

What stuck out to me most about this system was its calming effect on the kids and me. There’s always that period of standing in the middle of boxes and trash when you look around and don’t know what to do next. For me, it ends up making circles around me, as I lift one thing, set it down, move on to the next room, and do the same, listless, overwhelmed.

With the filing system, I used school time for school and squeezed packing into evenings and weekends. Moving seems to take as much time as I’ve got, so taking time off school simply extends the madness. Doing school gave me something to occupy my hands and brain during the listless overwhelmed times. I kept a notepad by my chair, though, so that I could make a note of the clear thoughts. When school was over, I had a to-do list already thought out.

One of the brilliant insights that this mom had about the filing system was moving on at the end of the week. Sure, you can move work you’ve missed to the next week’s folder and let it pile up. You can add an extra week into your year to get caught up and watch summer creep in faster and faster. But you can also do what other teachers do: prioritize. When there’s a fire drill or school picture day, Mrs. Frizzle doesn’t send a note home saying there will be Saturday school. Instead, some things get skipped.

My kids’ folders were getting thicker and thicker this past week as I hoped to get caught up on the little odds and ends when I remembered this advice. I looked at the pages and pages of math worksheets, the grammar quizzes, the half-started writing assignments, and I separated them into what was really important to me that they get done and what could be let go.

My kids are happier and more enthusiastic because they can see the end in sight most weeks. In fact, some of their work hadn’t gotten done because they’d enthusiastically pursued other school projects on their own–my daughter is writing a book about immigration to America, and my son is building a model of a copy machine. The filing system has given me the confidence to let them pursue their interests more because I can see whether or not we’re on track.

We bought new underwear and a new coffee pot. Luckily, we have enough bookshelves that moving companies refused our business, so the broken one in the garage can wait. The books are put away, thanks to a sweet homeschooling friend who understands bibliomania, and my school table is filled with the children and the life (minus the moving) that I’ve always wanted.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mother of four, ages 9, 7, 3, and 2. She has a BA in Literature and an MEd in Teaching and is currently surviving seminary with her husband of ten years. Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.