I belong to a email list MOMYS, and on there, we are discussing the use of Workboxes in a big family.  Since I haven’t been able to do too much to update my workbox posts, I thought I would address some thoughts there because I can’t get to my pics and do fun posts!! (other than old ones!) 

I am doing workboxes with 9 children. They are 6 and 8 (1st grade) 8 and 8 (2nd grade – and yes – lots of 8 year olds!) 9 (3rd grade) 10 and 11 (5th grade) and 12 and 13 (6th grade).   I have 2 toddlers and 5 highschoolers.  If you are finding me from someone else, yes … I know that is a “big” family. 

We have been using the workbox system – inconsistently – since March 29th. It is been 5 weeks.  We don’t do our workboxes everyday but this system did what I NEEDED it to do in March. It revitalized my children’s desire to do school learn. They were so excited that I was excited. 

In addition to that very lofty result… we got all of those great learning tools off of the shelf that we never had time for, or that I didn’t make time for.  They get to do the enrichment that is the part of homeschooling that I love in theory that is hard to implement in practice. 

The way that our workboxes work (if you can see from one of the early posts)  is that each child has a box.  These boxes cost $5.00 from Dollar General.  I do NOT have the space for 9*12 boxes plus shelves. We primarily school in the dining room for our table time and it is already full considering that it seats 20 and has 2 highchairs in it.  We have a set of shelves and each child’s workboxes are on that shelf.  Each child’s bucket contains their sideways manilla folders (cost 19.99$ for 100. )  I did 9 each at the start so used 81 folders and have 19 spares in case of rips.  We used primarily packaging tape and leftover cardstock for ours.  I could figure the cost at 2.00$ for the tape I used, you could use any kind of paper you have.  I used a different color for each child to make it easier on me. 

I fill their folders every night that we are going to use workboxes the next day.  I have a worksheet that I totally stole from someone on the workbox yahoo group. I fill this out with their must-dos. Then I fill in the fun-dos!  Some days we don’t do workboxes, but we store some of our stuff in the back of our boxes so they pull them out anyway.  We might do some partial days, we might do some unit study only days where we work all together most of the time.

My kids beg every day to do workboxes.  Thanks for other bloggers to sharing their systems!

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