awesome response! !thank you so much. I too am thinking that maybe I need to switch doing the all together stuff 1st. Everyone gets too rowdy in the afternoon.

I have 2 other questions that maybe you could answer in your post.

1. I need to work 1 on 1 for math and 1 on 1 for spelling and 1 on 1 for reading (since i have 1 beginning reader and 2 just emerging)…that is ALOT of time just for 1 on1 time. I know you are dealing with special needs too (as I am…my one daughter doesn’t have LD’s, but she was adopted from China at age 3 so her ESL is a barrier to learning). How in the world do you manage all of the 1 on1 phonic time for several kiddos.

2. also…do the things stay the same in their bins all week? or do you change the workboxes every night? that is where I flunked before with workboxes. I was fine to get things together sunday night but it all fell apart after that:) A PS teacher friend of mine suggested just using the same learning activity every day with them.

Thank you so much!!! BTW, I just found your blog myself and I just referred a friend to your post on creating an anti anxiety kit. She adopted her kiddo from foster care and they are really struggling.

I have file folders and a large box labelled “workboxes” that I put ideas for rotating activities in and then on Sunday evenings when I am doing my homeschool planning for the week, I fill the workboxes and add the rotating activities. If we are doing a unit study, then they will usually correspond to that. Having too many ideas (Pinterest is full of them!) is a problem I have too!

We do all of our group work like devotions, prayer time, me reading the Story of the World lesson and the Apologia lesson etc. together before the workboxes and even things that might relate to a worksheet in the workboxes get discussed before and then when we are done that, they do their workboxes so that they work through them at their own pace. I tried the other way and it was a disaster so this is what we found works for us.

I am planning sometime in the coming week to do a bit of a “day in the life” post. I was hoping to have it done by Monday so that I could join in the Not Back to School Blog Hop but it won’t be finished by then but by mid-week hopefully and that might give you a better idea of how it works for us.

Thanks for sharing this on Facebook Jennifer!

PS I’ve shared this with my FB followers!