BJU Press Blog

homeschool materials

Decluttering Without Discarding

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decluttering colored pencils
Textbooks, notebooks, binders, handouts, tablets, portable DVD players, pencils, manipulatives, art supplies—these are the things that crowd your homeschool space. With all that stuff lying around, it can seem cluttered and overwhelming. How can learning happen with so many distractions? Decluttering is a great idea, but you can’t get rid of any of those things because they’re a part of your homeschool.

One of the first things I discovered when I got my own place was that as life goes on, things accumulate. And you can’t always get rid of them. That’s where the old adage, “a place for everything and everything in its place,” comes into play.

The more you take the time to find homes for your homeschool materials—or anything else in your house—the less cluttered it will seem. So how do you find homes for all your homeschool materials?

Find a setup that works for your family

The space you use for homeschooling changes where you’re going to put things. If you have a whole room dedicated to homeschooling, then you may have more storage space. If your whole house is your homeschool space, then you may be able to store your materials wherever they seem most natural. And if your dining room table doubles as your homeschool space, you may have to get creative about storing your books.

Check out what some other homeschool moms have done with their homeschool spaces. You might get a great idea!

Invest in storage equipment

Sometimes, the difference between an organized space and a cluttered mess is having things to put other things in. What will work best for you—bookshelves or storage-cubes? How are you going to keep track of the little things? If you like the office look, you might go for mini drawer sets that sit on top of a desk. If you’re crafty, mason jars with cute labels can make perfect desk organizers.

Here are three tips for keeping your homeschool space decluttered and organized.

Feel free to be creative when decluttering

There are plenty of storage issues that you’ll run into as you go. You can’t plan for everything, but you can make the decision to be creative in getting to a solution. Here are some ideas you can think about ahead of time.

Decluttering doesn’t always mean discarding things. If all your possessions have homes to go to, then decluttering your house just means putting everything back in its place. And when everything has a place to go to, cleaning gets a lot easier.

How to Create Your Own Grading Rubric for High School (Printable)

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Grading Rubric

Grading a high school writing project can be more than a little confusing. Outside of simple grammar problems, there are a lot of different things to look for in an essay. A grading rubric is an invaluable assessment tool that gives you objective standards to assess your child’s writing. Teacher’s editions for BJU Press writing and grammar textbooks do provide general rubrics for all high school writing projects, but you may have other more specific goals for your student’s writing, such as

  • strong verb usage,
  • greater sentence variety,
  • natural sentence flow, and
  • avoiding passive voice.

Your child might benefit from a rubric specifically designed for him that focuses on what he struggles with in his writing. Being able to create your own grading rubric gives you control over what is emphasized in each assignment.

For example, your ninth-grade student has difficulty with sentence variety even though he has a good vocabulary. You’d like him to use his personal experience essay in Writing & Grammar 9 to practice before he writes his research essay, but the suggested rubric is designed to evenly assess a variety of different concepts, including sentence variety. You would like to change the rubric so that sentence variety is worth more points. Though you could switch out a few categories, you’d prefer to use this assignment to emphasize only a few ideas.

Printable Rubric

How do you create your own rubric so that you can focus specifically on the few ideas your child struggles with?

Creating a Grading Rubric

Rubrics follow one simple rule: the more general the rubric, the more subjective the grading will be. But the opposite is also true: the more specific and detailed your rubric, the more objective and straightforward the grading will be.

While it may seem easier (and faster) to make a grading rubric with three categories worth seven points each for a twenty-one point assignment, you might get stuck if you try to grade with that rubric alone.

You can get a little bit further by separating the number of points and assigning them to a rating. An excellent paper might get seven points, while an average paper might get four or five.

Download these grading rubric templates for ideas on how you might make your rubric more specific and detailed.

But how can you decide what makes an excellent paper excellent? Adding descriptions to the values of each category that separate good from excellent turns subjective grading into objective grading. Additionally, the descriptions will give you something to point to if your child questions his grade, and they give your child something to aim for as he’s writing. If he keeps in mind what you’ve described as excellent as he’s completing the project, he’s more likely to achieve it.

So for your ninth-grade student, you could lay out your rubric like this:

Alternate Rubric sample

This sample rubric is a customized version of the same rubrics you’ll find in all Writing & Grammar courses. See more ninth-grade writing assignments and their rubrics in the Writing & Grammar 9 Teacher’s Edition.

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