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How do you organize your homeschool books?

What do the stacks of books shown above have in common? Can you guess? It's the time frames they each represent. The top picture shows books from the Fall of Rome to the early colonies (Year 2 in Tapestry of Grace terms). The bottom left is books about the 20th Century (studied in Year 4 of Tapestry), while the picture on the bottom right shows picture books about the ancient world (Year 1).When we homeschooled, all of the books were filed on our bookshelves in chronological order. Each book had a colored circle on its spine that matched the color of the Tapestry year-plan. So, red was Year 1; brown was Year 2; Year 3 was green, and Year 4 was blue. I used a permanent marker to add in the unit number so that I could see at a glance where that book was used in my year-plan. (I used an "M" for multi-unit.)Each week, I pulled the books that we needed and put them in a milk crate that we kept nearby. I also had a bookshelf that had four shelves on it for my teacher guides. The top shelf had the teacher guides for multi-level subjects, such as my Tapestry of Grace binders. We had three sons, so each of the other shelves held the guides that I needed to teach each son, such as those for English grammar or math. This simple organizational system made it easy to keep up with our books.Want to read how other people organize their homeschool books? Here are a few links that will help you get going:

• Raising Arrows: Simplify and Organize Your Homeschool Bookshelves

• Tapestry of Grace: How to Organize Your Tapestry Books

• Blog, She Wrote: Organizing Your Homeschool Library

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If you use Tapestry of Grace, you might be interested in receiving some free spine stickers so you can organize your books too. Just fill out this short form and we'll send some templates to your inbox.

...I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library - Jorge Luis Borges