Workbox System

We are several months into using the Workbox system with ds12 and it is working great.  I have been recently looking at other peoples pictures of their Workbox systems and decided that ours was really lacking in visual appeal.  My husband is an awesome self taught graphics man so I brought it up to him and he made me all new numbers and a new schedule sheet.  Our son is really into football so we went with that.  Here are some pictures of what he made.  We used to have very plain black numbers on white and plain white schedule. I am not sure how much you can tell from the picture but each number has a little football player behind it. This is our schedule sheet and when he completes the box with that number on it he moves the number from the schedule over to the box and places the whole box in the completed work bin.  The following is a picture of his work boxes.

These are his morning boxes.  He does six in the morning and six in the afternoon after lunch.  Some of his boxes have a work with mom picture on them below the number and those are the boxes he needs to work with me.  The next picture is of his work area.  It is not overly fancy but he gets distracted easily so it works better if it is a little simpler.

As I said earlier he does 12 boxes a day.  He has been able to accomplish so much more with this system and with a lot better attitude.  I try to vary what he has in his boxes and alternate his easy and hard tasks.  To give you an example I am going to list his boxes he did today.

box 1- devotions (Keys for Kids)

box 2- prayer time with mom (we use Operation World and pray for a new country or people group each day)  and Bible (we use Bob Jones and today he worked on a lesson about Easter)

box 3- half hour of Rosetta Stone Latin

box 4- Tuesday is the day we do something hands-on for math and today was Tanagrams

box 5- Read aloud (we read the Legend of the Sand Dollar and then we observed a real sand dollar)

box 6- quiet time box ( one half hour of listening to Jonathon Park with headphones on)

box 7- two pages in his Spectrum 6 th grade reading workbook

box 8- worksheet on the placement and names of our teeth and made a paper model of the different layer of a tooth

box 9- read 6 pages about Mohammed in Famous Men of the Middle Ages and made a mini book about him to put in our Middle Ages lapbook

box 10- wordsearch in Ludere Latine book and Latin flash cards

box 11- copywork Mark 15:25-26 in cursive.  We have been doing verses that relate to the Easter story and we are going to make a booklet when we are done.

box 12- Easter worksheets ( a wordsearch, a draw a symmetrical Easter bunny sheet, an easter to decorate sheet, and a matching Easter egg pattern sheet)

We will be setting up a workbox system for ds11 over the weekend also.  He will need a lot less boxes however and his work is more hands on.  Even though it will work a little different for him I am hoping it will help him in doing more "sit down" work.  One thing I have found that I think works pretty well for  him is to have a lot of motivators so I will probably have him do about two or three boxes and then put a snack he likes in the following box.

By the way all this is based on Sue Patricks system and her website is listed in my links.  We don't follow her system exactly.  We have modified it to fit our homeschool.  It has been a great success for us so far!

 Update (August 27, 2009)

If anyone is interested in the football theme workbox numbers and schedule my husband created I have posted them at Scribd.