DS9 went through Super Scratch Programming a couple of years ago, and since then has just been looking at other people's programs, and watching YouTube videos on how to do specific things. But a couple of weeks ago I stumbled across and bought him Coding Games in Scratch, which is a DK book, and he loves it! The book walks you through how to make 10 very different games, telling you exactly what to code, and why. What I love is that at the end of each game, it has several suggestions for how to tweak the game, which are left as exercises for the reader. I think he's made about half of the games, and on every one he's done at least a few tweaks. He's been engrossed in this book since we bought it, and I highly recommend it!

We also use Book Catalog. You can categorize books by "shelves", and put books on multiple shelves. You can also tag books, and scan them in using your phone's camera. I use it not only to track all of the books we own, but I also entered in all the books we'll need for the next several years of our curriculum (BYL). I tagged those books as "need," (or "own" if I already own them) and sorted them onto shelves by which grade they are used. This has been super helpful when I make trips to Savers and can't remember if I already have a book, or if I even need it! (Well, of course I need it- it's a book!- but you know what I mean :))

I had to buy new plastic drawers when I originally did this, and I spent some time in the store trying them out to make sure they'd work. They take a little bit of jiggling to get them to come all the way out, but not too bad. The games we have in the drawers don't tend to be ones that travel (for some reason we usually take card games with us, maybe because they're more portable?), but yeah, I figure you could put the pieces in a ziploc bag. Or use the actual boxes - ours are all stacked neatly in a corner in the basement. Nobody is rummaging around in them, so they stay neatly stacked! We have a couple of larger games that aren't in the drawers, and they live in a separate closet because we don't play them as often. Things like Catan, or Ticket to Ride, which we only play on the weekends as a whole family. But as DS gets older and some of the younger games move out, we may move those in to the drawers. Our game boards are all standing on their ends in a bin next to the shelf with the game pieces. So they're all in one place, and I used a label maker to label them so it's easy to tell which is which.

Speaking of games... we play a lot of games in our house, and I used this method for organizing them several years ago, and it's amazing! I got sick of reorganizing the boxes over and over again, and having it all fall apart as soon as someone pulled a game out of the bottom of the stack. Now our games are always organized and easy to find, and it's so easy to put back loose pieces when we find them! It has to have been at least 3 years since I first did it, and I haven't had to reorganize or clean up our games since then, other than to add in new games, get rid of old ones we no longer play, and occasionally recorral the card games back into their box. I love it!

Because I cleaned out the bathroom closet, the extra bathroom supplies can be moved into there, instead of living in DS's closet. (No more sneaking into his room in the middle of the night because we just realized we're out of contact solution!) Because I cleaned out DS's closet, I just realized that we can move his dresser into his closet. This opens up significant wall space, which means we can get him more (desperately needed) bookshelves in his room. No more random piles of books because they don't fit on the shelves! Yay! Because our closet floor is now cleaned, and we got rid of a bunch of stuff from it, we now have a perfect place to put our brand new firebox. DH was concerned that we're just "shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic" (ie not really decluttering, just moving stuff around). But I pointed out the sheer volume of stuff I've gotten rid of, and that we're finally able to keep things in places that make sense (rather than just where they fit). There's also more room on our shelves and in our closets, as things aren't packed in there nearly as tightly. Also, we went clothes shopping yesterday, and DH and I each ended up not buying shirts that we were on the fence about. He even asked me if the one I was considering sparked joy (although he mangled the phrase :)), and it did not. We're learning! :)

Yesterday just as I was ready to head out to the grocery store, it started pouring rain, so I Konmari'd the pantry. Now I have a bag of food to go to the food pantry, and I can open the door without things trying to fall on my head. You know how she says that if you do your own stuff, the other people will join in? It totally works. DH got rid of several shirts and shorts, and (finally!) cleaned out his sock drawer (which was full to bursting with old, falling apart socks). But more exciting is that DS8 has joined in. He happily went through all his toys in the playroom, and easily pulled out a box full of things to donate. Then when we were doing laundry, he asked me to show him how to fold his shirts the "special way," because apparently he has a deep seated hatred of hangars of which I was unaware. Now all of our drawers look so pretty! :)

I thought you guys would particularly appreciate this article. "Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs†is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?"

I think that's a pretty neat skill to have! The only person I've ever seen do that is the comedian Demetri Martin, who uses it as part of his act.

I use a heavy canvas bag my mom got at a quilt show, but wish I had something easier on my shoulder. I only have one, and now that we're out of the picture book stage, it's easier, but it was pretty touch and go there for a while. I was with another homeschooler at one of our branch libraries once, and one of the librarians came over and made a point of thanking the other mom for checking out such a huge stack of books. Apparently it helped their circulation numbers, so the librarian loved it!

Yesterday I finally donated our first load of Konmari'd stuff (which completely filled up the back of my SUV), as well posted and sold a bunch of books online, and sold a couple of knitting things. The end result is that I now have several 30% off coupons for Savers (apparently they give you 5% off for each bag you donate), I made $70, and I have quite the stack to take to the post office this afternoon. :hurray: My bookshelves look so pretty! I should take a picture to share. :) But today is our first day back to school, so the decluttering efforts are about to slow way down.

My son also never enjoyed coloring or crafty projects, and would much prefer to play with Legos or build something (although he had no fine motor delays). So I was pretty surprised when we started doing art, and I found out that he actually enjoyed drawing and learning to draw. He still didn't have a lot of interest in coloring his pictures, but he did enjoy learning how to draw realistic looking pictures. We used Mark Kistler's "Draw Squad" book, and "What Shall I Draw Today," and we were pretty successful with them. I think drawing felt to him like it had more of a purpose- at least more so than "color in this drawing someone else had already done."

Me! I'm sitting down to take a break after spending several hours cleaning out our books. So much more space on our bookshelves, plus I rediscovered some great books I'd forgotten about. And a friend who just bought a new house with a huge yard came by, and I was able to pass on a small stack of gardening/homesteading books to her, which she was thrilled with. I've been stacking my "to donate" pile in the front entranceway (which we never use). Apparently it's time to make a donation run, because it's started spilling over into the living room. And that's without the 6 trash bags of clothes and yarn and fabric which are still stacked in my bedroom! I can't wait to get it all out the door, and see how much nicer my house feels without all this stuff!

Wait, are you saying reading blog posts and articles and this thread don't count as "working on decluttering"?? Say it isn't so!! :lol:

I finished reading the book (well, listening to it on Hoopla) on Wednesday, and KonMari'd my clothes yesterday. I'd say I got rid of half my clothes! I nicely folded my socks and tshirts, and I found the sock foldling, in particular, oddly soothing. While I'm very excited to get rid of all these things that don't spark joy, is anyone else finding this is actually costing them money? This is the final push I need to finally go buy myself a new dresser (my current one has two unusable drawers, because no matter what I do, they make clothes put in them stink!). And getting rid of things that I actually kind of disliked, but kept because they did a job, means I now have several holes in my wardrobe that need to be filled. I guess it comes down to which do I dislike more: shopping, or living with clothes I don't particularly like? It's a close call! :laugh:

FYI, If you're looking to just try it out, you can download the instructions and first 8 days of lessons from the publisher's website for free.

It took me a full year to get through TWJ, and I didn't feel like I got that much out of it (maybe because it took so long!) Later I purchased Jot It Down, and while we didn't end up doing any of the projects, I felt like it was a much clearer, more succinct explanation of the "lifestyle."

I'm still a newbie, so I don't know if it's possible to do that. But you can email their help desk - I've had good luck with them answering questions before. I will say that what I did (in my case, for science experiments), is to put in reminders for the assignments themselves. So if for a certain experiment I need to make sure I have lettuce on hand, I added a reminder to that assignment, and told it to email me the reminder 7 days beforehand (so I have enough lead time beforehand).

DH does occassionally, too. But we've noticed that DS doesn't do nearly as good of a job when he's distracted by reading, so... Personally I'd rather hurry up and get the brushing over with so I can fully concentrate on my book (rather than divide my attention), but apparently I'm in the minority on that one (at least in my house)!

We frequently have to tell DS8 "No reading while brushing your teeth!"

I just want to mention a trick for searching the forums. Using Google, if you type in your search terms followed by "site:" and then the site you want to search, it will come back with only results from that site (that's site, then a colon, then the url, no spaces). So if you wanted to search AAS on the WTM forums, you'd type in the Google search bar: AAS site:forums.welltrainedmind.com I do this a lot when researching new curriculum, because I'm more likely to find long time users of a program, along with both positive and negative reviews. HTH :)

Yup. Planning is so neat and organized and look at all the pretty things we're going to do, and the ordered lists.... While teaching an actual child- is not quite so pretty and organized :lol: DS spent last week with my in-laws, so I spent a good portion of it doing my planning for next year. I considered it a vacation well spent, and quite enjoyed it, while DH thought I was slightly more crazy than usual. :laugh:

I mentioned this thread to DS8, and he suggested "Building School." I said, "Well, we do more than just build..." (Although there is quite a bit of that going on - mostly of the Lego and Zoob variety). His reply was, "We're building brains!" :laugh:

I'm third the Sequential Spelling recommendation. It's all about finding the patterns in words, and building smaller, easier words up into longer, harder words. There are no worksheets - you just go through the days spelling list once each day. If you go to their website (sorry, can't link, I'm on my phone) you can look at and download the first week's worth of the program and give it a try. I've been doing the first book with DS for a couple of months now, and is been working really well for us (much better than a phonogram based approach, which is what we tried first).

I quickly jotted down his recommendations when I watched this. For beginner level he mentioned AoPS coding (they have some coding classes on the website?) Kahn Academy coding classes Code Academy More advanced Project Euler (he particularly liked the time aspect of this - not only do you need to write a program that does something, but it also needs to run in under a minute, for example)Top level Top Coder USA Coding Olympiad

I haven't - Chemistry is the first RSO we've done. It wasn't a bad program, it just didn't click with me (DS liked it fine, it was just me who was dreading science every week).