Organizing Homeschool Subjects with Color
In my last two posts, I relayed how there is no such thing as a perfect homeschooling space and then shared how we modified our living room to accommodate our homeschooling lifestyle. You may have noticed that I used a lot of vibrant color when I decorated our not-so-perfect homeschool room, and if you’ve looked at my planner pages at all, you may notice that I use a different colored font for each subject in the planner. I really like organizing with color. I find visual cues to be really helpful, and I suspect many of you do, too. I thought I would share a little about how color can be used to help you with daily homeschooling organization.
When I started homeschooling, I immediately decided to color-code different subjects. I started with purchasing binders in a lot of different colors. You can certainly pick any color system you want. My system includes: pink for language arts, turquoise for mathematics, green for science, periwinkle for history, orange for geography, yellow for foreign languages, purple for religious studies, red for art, and blue for music.
This color-coding system helps us easily identify what we are looking for without having to read the spine of the binder. Our notebooks and folders for each subject match the binder colors, creating a cohesive system that facilitates quick retrieval of materials for any subject.
We also use some visual aids to differentiate between kids. My daughter chose the picture of the elephant that you see on the binder spines as her identification image. Her binders all have the elephant logo. My oldest son started with a cute picture of a dinosaur. Now that he’s getting older, we switched out all of his binder spines. His subjects are now written in Latin (his choice) and feature an image of a barred owl. Giving each child an identifying logo helps me quickly determine who left a binder out so I don’t tell the wrong kid to pick up their mess!
If you look at this picture and wonder why there is a bird at the bottom of each binder, then you have some pretty spectacular observational skills! The chickadee is another logo: our school logo. When we first started homeschooling, I thought it would be fun for the kids to choose a mascot and a school name. They chose “Little Chickadee Academy.” We recently switched binder spines for my older son because he decided that he had advanced beyond being a little chickadee. He now attends “Barred Owl Academy,” which seems to be heavily influenced by the magical world of Harry Potter.
The color-coding system also helps me organize my planner and my own homeschool binder. If you have looked at my planner on my website, you might notice the file size is rather large. The planner pages get used every day, and it’s a lot of pages to store at one time, so I have a master binder that only stores two or three months of planner pages at a time, as well as my attendance pages and my lesson plans for each subject. I attach color-coded tabs to each lesson plan in my binder. Honestly, I don’t read most of the tabs because I just look at the colors. It would have been nice, though, if I had found tabs with a greater variety of colors. I had to use markers to change some of the colors, and I didn’t always achieve the right shade. Getting the shade just right isn’t the goal of the system, though. The goal is to make it easier to find what I’m looking for, so the visual cue still helps.
Near the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I use color-coding on my planner pages, as well. The main part of the planner is a two-page spread for each week of the year. Each weekly spread has a chart with days of the week on the top and subjects along the left side of the page. I color-coded the font for each subject to match my color-scheme.
If you are a highly visual person, you may have noticed in my last blog post that the charts that I made for my kids to check off their daily tasks contain the same color system. It really helps divide their chart into sections so they can easily see what subjects we are aiming to complete that day. I’ve reposted the image here so you don’t have to jump back to my previous post to find it. The colors really stand out on their charts!
There are many ways that you can incorporate color into your homeschool to provide visual cues for you and your kids. Now that my brain is ruminating about colors, I’m trying to think of even more ways to incorporate color into our organization as a time-saving tool. Colored labels on bookshelves and cabinets? Colored baskets for tools for each subject?
Adding a color-scheme for your homeschool subjects can definitely save you some time and make it easy for kids to keep supplies organized, and who doesn’t love some added color?
