Making workboxes work for us
We have had a lot of upheaval in our workbox set up over the last six months because of moving, trying to fit all our stuff into a new house and with things just not working the way that they used to. How things used to work are that we had a specific room for schooling and all of the kids boxes and all of the school stuff used to be kept in the one room. Well how things have changed! We now don’t have a room set aside for schooling; our new home just doesn’t have that sort of space and to make matters worse we just don’t seem to have the time that we used to have.
The old setup
       What goes in all those baskets?   F's Boxes
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Our old set up was like I said, a room set aside for all our school stuff. It was easy to quickly fill each of the kid’s workboxes each night without too much fuss. Each child had their own set of draws and we had the space to make it work. You can view pictures of our old setup to the left. T's boxes       Boxes 8 and 9 are lunch and group boxes   
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The new set up
Ok so like I said once we moved things changed and we have spent the last few months trying to iron out all the kinks. To start with not having all out school stuff in the same place has caused problems with filling the boxes. First there is the issue of limited room in our new home causing the need to have everything spread all over the house, which makes filling the boxes time consuming and quite frankly frustrating. I found myself getting lazy and not covering all the subjects that the kids should have been covering in a week, on some days I would not fill all their boxes just from the sheer frustration of having to traipse all over the house every night.
The first step to our current solution was that I started filling the boxes only once a week. I done this by putting zip-loc bags in the draws, one for each day and writing the day the work was to be completed on each those bags. This worked for the most part but I had to keep some of the more bulky stuff in a box of its own. Realistically though this is not a problem and except for other deciding factors we would have probably stayed with this setup. But there are other deciding factors;
1. We are (still) trying to organise the house so that it is relatively organised
2. The now 4yo F has decided she wants more boxes but we don’t really have the room
3. 7.5yo L has been getting up at 5am and starting his work
4. 12yo T has been complaining about L disturbing her while she is trying to do her work (with him starting at 5am he finishes before the others are ½ way through)
So I have had to make some more changes just to keep the arguing to a minimum. I will be adding a page to this website for each of the kids in the near future which will show how our workboxes have evolved. But for now just know that I have had to move the two older kids desks to their rooms to solve part of our problem, and I’m still in the process of perfecting their new systems.
The first step to our current solution was that I started filling the boxes only once a week. I done this by putting zip-loc bags in the draws, one for each day and writing the day the work was to be completed on each those bags. This worked for the most part but I had to keep some of the more bulky stuff in a box of its own. Realistically though this is not a problem and except for other deciding factors we would have probably stayed with this setup. But there are other deciding factors;
1. We are (still) trying to organise the house so that it is relatively organised
2. The now 4yo F has decided she wants more boxes but we don’t really have the room
3. 7.5yo L has been getting up at 5am and starting his work
4. 12yo T has been complaining about L disturbing her while she is trying to do her work (with him starting at 5am he finishes before the others are ½ way through)
So I have had to make some more changes just to keep the arguing to a minimum. I will be adding a page to this website for each of the kids in the near future which will show how our workboxes have evolved. But for now just know that I have had to move the two older kids desks to their rooms to solve part of our problem, and I’m still in the process of perfecting their new systems.
