Aspirational and Sentimental Homeschool Clutter

I may not have a lot of books compared to some homeschoolers, but it feels like a lot when I'm sorting through things and feeling overwhelmed. When I realized books had overflowed off of two bookshelves into my storage room and were piled high in stacks on a filing cabinet, I knew I had to do something about that. Thankfully, it was Christmas break so I could finally tackle the project.

Let's take a specific book I've been saving as an example and make it our scapegoat. The book in question is What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know (Revised and updated): Preparing Your Child for a Lifetime of Learning (The Core Knowledge Series) and my youngest child is 11 years old and in 5th grade. This means this dialogue also applies to several more books I own in the series.

My dialogue goes something like this:

"What if there are holes in his education? He needs to know X and Y from kindergarten to be able to lay a foundation for other things."

"What if my grandchildren homeschool and these are the fundamental things this book says they need to know, and they are at my house a lot so I should read them educational things and/or I should pass this book on to my kids to teach THEIR kids?"

"What if it turns out this book was so important and it goes out of print?"

And the sentimental clutter argument: "But all my kids learned from this book. It was important in our lives at one point. I wish I could go back in time and homeschool all over again and do it better..."

Ask yourself these questions:

Can I replace it on the cheap? 

There are always people selling things they wrote in the first few pages of and then realized the resource was not for them. People sell things on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, in Facebook homeschool groups, used bookstores, EVERYWHERE. 

Huh, would you look at that! I found the old version for $3.99 on ThriftBooks (shop there if you haven't because they are amazing and if you click the link you get 15% off plus the more you buy, the more you get free using their Reading Rewards program)! (also, sorry if my ENTIRE BLOG PAGE is covered by ads for Thrift Books ... Google AdSense gets really excited when I post any sort of link they can place an ad for ... shrug)

You can probably always find what you need to replace that ONE thing you maybe gave away that you regret getting rid of. And if not...

The information you need is going to be on the internet. 

Seriously, the book I referenced above (which is a series that goes through only 6th grade, by the way, which means I need to very soon be getting SEVEN books out of my house) is from 1996. That's 24 years ago, people. Yes, the info stands the test of time, and it is very common elementary school info as well. And with a simple Amazon search, I can see that this book has been revised and updated in 2013 anyway.

Make some copies.

Here's where I suggest copying JUST the table of contents and sticking those FEW pieces of paper into a file marked "Tables of Contents" ... much smaller than keeping every book. (FYI, when I went to Amazon to check out this book, a customer had posted the Table of Contents so there you go.)

Now what?

After you have figured out what you want to get rid of versus things that will truly be useful someday, it's time to decide what to sell (and where) and what to just donate (and where). Yes, more decisions, and if you're getting decision fatigue (it's a real thing!) at this point, I give you permission to TAKE A BREAK! Grab something to eat and drink. Take a walk. Go do something else for an hour or a day or a week.

Then head over here to check out my piece called Conquer Homeschool Clutter 😀

Happy decluttering!