Organizing your homeschool with pinterest

This series is sponsored by my absolute favorite homeschool organizing tool…Scholaric Planner. Scholaric makes my planning life a breeze!

Who here loves pinterest and spends way too much time there?  I can certainly raise my hand.  Who here has a pinterest board called “homeschool?”  I can raise my hand too.

When you see a great idea on a blog, where do you pin it?  Does it go into a generic board for homeschooling?  How do you find the ideas later?  Do you scroll through the 1000 pins of your homeschool board?

 

I’d like to suggest a different method to organize your boards, and if you’re trying to increase your influence on pinterest, this will help you too.  First pull out the curriculum you’re using.  Look at what topics they cover.  I’m using Apologia for Science, topics covered in elementary school include: flying creatures, land animals, swimming creatures, astronomy, botany, anatomy.  Each of those links are to pinterest board for future years of science.  Now when I see anything cool for one of those subjects it automatically goes to that board.  When I first joined pinterest we were learning about swimming creatures, but I went ahead and created the other boards, and I was very thankful for that as I went through and created my lesson plans for the coming year in anatomy.  Next year when I go to plan astronomy, I’ll be good to go with dozens of ideas to use, more than I can use, but you never know what might help when you get there.

 

That’s my next tip, pin everything you might want to use again someday.  EVERYTHING.  Nothing frustrates me more than to remember an idea was somewhere and not know what happened to it because I didn’t pin it, or couldn’t pin it.

 

 

Here’s a screen shot of my anatomy board.  If you look, the black arrows point to two pins for building a model of the heart and blood flow.  I obviously am not going to build two models of the heart, but having multiple ideas available lets me have more choices when I reach that point.  The blue arrows point to two more ideas for the circulatory chapter in anatomy.  I probably will not use all these ideas, but it helps me organize my thoughts better as I plan.

 

Next, think through who you are following.  Recently I’ve realized I was following many, many preschool boards.  My youngest is now in first grade.  So, as I’ve sat waiting for kids at various functions, I’ve been deleting people with boards saying “A activities,” or “preschool sensory bins.”  Why?  Because it’s no longer relevant to what I need.  Why keep my pinterest feed filled with those materials?

 

If you look at my pinterest feed, almost every single post there I’d be tempted to repin, because they’re all on topics I know I might use someday.  Don’t feel obliged to follow someone just because you’ve always followed them.  I am slowly learning this fact, and because of that am slowly weeding out the boards I’m not interested in.  I have no interest in a board on fashion to buy.  I will follow a board about sewing a garment, but I’m not a big fashion person.  Figure out what boards work best for you.  Is your child in preschool?  Follow a bunch of preschool boards, when you repin something it almost always shows you where else it is pinned, follow that board, chances are they have more things you like.  After following that board, look at what else that person has for boards.

 

I can not being to tell you what wonderful resources I have found by following the suggested board, and then clicking on that person’s name and following some more boards.

 

Does this mean I suggest spending all your time on pinterest?  Heavens no!  But, I think spending a few minutes a day can help you greatly as you set about organizing your school years to come.