5 Good Investments to Make for Your Homeschool

1. Amazon Prime - For those of us with tiny libraries, this is a must. I order books, supplies, even diapers and shampoo when I'm too busy teaching kids to read good and can't get to the store. Right now they have free Prime for moms, which means free shipping and access to all of their free movies, music, and tv shows.

2. A laser printer - These babies are expensive, so I watched Amazon for a while to get a good deal. Even though the up-front cost is high, the money you save on ink more than makes up for it. Our black and white model is a workhorse and I am saving up to get a color one soon.

3. A giant piece of furniture with a bunch of tiny drawers - This is something you've really got to hunt down. Ours is a metal filing type cabinet with paper-sized drawers that I covered with contact paper. I've seen some fabulous old library card catalogs repurposed into homeschooling storage. Whatever you use, make sure to find one with more drawers than you think you need, as they fill up quick. Ours houses pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, all manner of office and craft supplies, and recyclable bits and pieces like paper towel rolls.

4. Bookshelves - Every room in our house has bookshelves. It's good to have some out of the way shelves for resources you won't need very often, and some very accessible ones for your everyday resources. We keep our most used books and resources in the living room, so that I can easily grab what I need for the next day.

5. Extra help - You can not do everything. Scratch that. You can not do everything well. Homeschool moms do a lot. We wear many hats, and sometimes you've got to put some of those on someone else in order to keep your priorities straight. For us, that means I accept when my mom offeres to do an occasional load of laundry for me. I sometimes get the groceries delivered so I don't have to drag two kids through the store. When the budget allows, I plan on paying for someone to help me do some cleaning, and you better believe my kids are learning to help out. There is this crazy idea that some of us have that we have to do it all. What I'm saying is that it's better to do a good job on the important things and delegate the rest.