Until now.
In August I signed up for a trial period to use the CM Organizer from Simply Charlotte Mason and I am hooked. This has been life-changing for this home school mom, friends!
The monthly fee kept me from trying the CM Organizer when I first discovered it. Boy, was that a mistake. It costs $9.95 per month. Note to frugal self: some things are totally worth 10 bucks.
The CM Organizer truly is completely customizable. I set it up for our family at the start, and now I can organize all our books and curricula according to each child, or each subject, or each day. I can lump together all the things we study as a family, or I can see each item that each child works on independently, right down to the page they are on. I can easily schedule any of the 1500 resources they have already entered into the system at any time. Or I can enter a limitless number of my own selected resources for school. The CM Organizer saves all that info for me and lets me manipulate anything into our school schedules any time I want to. Now that's customization.
I will admit that when I took my trial run with the CM Organizer, for a fleeting moment I thought it was just going to take too much time to set it up. After all, I'm a busy mama, you know? But after a reality check, I realized that with several hours of uninterrupted time (that means Daddy took the kids outside to play one Saturday and no one was allowed back in for popscicles or bandaids) I was able to get the bones of the system ready to go for our family.
Since the initial set-up, I usually spend about one hour per week adding resources, checking off our progress, or tweaking the CM Organizer. What a difference! I used to spend about 45 minutes per night with a giant stack of books and notepads, writing out lesson plans and assignment sheets for the next day. In addition, every couple of weeks I used to have to sit down, spread everything out again, and review where we were in our big picture plan. Then I had to readjust everything because we were ahead in some subjects and behind in others. Then I had to figure out and write down what was coming up in the next couple of weeks. Then I had to put all my plans into a notebook and constantly shuffle, mark off, add to, etc. Well, not anymore. The CM Organizer keeps my books and other resources in a queue, so when we finish one the next one pops up in our plan. Genius! I LOVE not have having that late evening chore of planning and organizing our resources staring me in the face every night.
Just like anything new, you have to use it a bit to learn how to do it quickly. But once you figure it out it becomes very quick and efficient. It took me a couple of weeks of using it to really get the hang of it, and now I'm very fast at updating our progress or entering new goals or new resources.
One of the best features of the CM Organizer is that it keeps track of everything we do. I love that! I can instantly create reports that show all we've done for the week, or the month, or the school year, or the calendar year, or for a fixed range of dates. I knew our children were learning well, but I never realized how much material we cover here at Pecan Bluff Home School! I can also print reports for just one student, or for any combination of students, or for the whole family. They can be detailed reports or summaries. Now that the CM Organizer is keeping track of everything for me, I can check our reports any time, and my poor brain doesn't have to keep track of it all anymore. The CM Organizer does it for me.
I also love the fact that the CM Organizer helps me keep on track with ordering library books that we'll be needing. With the CM Organizer I know what books we have scheduled for each child and for our family, so I go to our library online and put in requests for the books we need. Then we pick them up at all once and I have the books exactly when we need them. Viola!
Perhaps the best feature of using the CM Organizer is how much it's cut down on my paper load. I'll bet I'm not the only home school mom with this problem ~ we have trouble taming the paper creature. Between my notes and lists and schedules, the kids school papers, their art creations, mail, coupons, and other general paper detritus, I constantly battle paper piles. But the CM Organizer tames much of that for me, because my planning lists and daily checklists and assignment sheets are no longer floating around our school/living room. The CM Organizer is keeping track of it all for me. Freedom!
Can you tell I love this tool? I don't work for the company or anything. I just wanted to share this because it has changed the way I teach this year, and it is such a blessing for our family. If you are a literature-loving home school family like us, this might be just the answer for you, too.
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