We have come to really enjoy our learning space upstairs. In my last post I shared how I began homeschooling my oldest daughter for the second semester of her kindergarten year in January. We started out doing our lessons in the dining room and work on the dining room table. I soon realized this wasn't the best place because the dining room always had books and papers everywhere, whenever we had people over we had to find a place to put all of our school supplies, and a dining room table and chairs designed to seat adults is not ideal when you are teaching handwriting skills and your 3 and 5 year olds have to sit on their feet with slouched backs to reach their papers at the table.
So, we moved upstairs. Our school room was formerly our guest bedroom/husband's office. When my husband graduated in December 2012 he slowly began taking all of his books to his office at work. We hurried this process along :) and also put the guest bed (which was my husband's bed as a kid) in our oldest daughter's room (which still serves our guest when they come and our daughter sleeps with her brother in his bunkbed). I quickly threw together what we had to make our new "school room" inviting. This is how it looked last year...
It hasn't changed a lot, but I added some new things to keep it fresh and updated. I found a clock at Dirt Cheap because it is much more fun to learn how to tell time on a real clock as opposed to a picture on a page. The "months of the year" and "days of the week" printables I got for free a few years back off of a mom blog. The American flag was $1.00 at JoAnn's Fabric. The window valance was 99 cents at TJMaxx. Alivia was given the chalkboard/dry erase easel from Mamaw on her third Birthday. The posters on the wall came in the Abeka Kindergarten curriculum. The table and chairs came from Santa when Alivia was 16 months old.
I wanted our school room to also have some fun things in it so that it wasn't a bore and so our children wouldn't associate school with all work and no play. I put Livi's Barbie house in one corner and the Smart cycle in another. The Smart Cycle has educational games they can play on the tv and get exercise at the same time. We have a new weather and temperature chart that came with our curriculum and a few years back I bought United States and Presidents of the US placemats for $1 each at Walmart and hung them up this year as posters since we will be memorizing these. I use my laminator all the time and the pink lamp on the desk was actually the one from my college dorm room. This desk was in my room as a kid.
The other side of the room has the desk (from Grant's Nanny) that I use, and also our school books, dollar store posters, and Weston's cars and track.
Above my desk is this calendar we received with our curriculum where we change out the months and numbers.
The book shelf by my desk has the kids school books, curriculum/lesson plans, the collection of classic chapter books we have begun thanks to Goodwill, and the kid's boxes of supplies (pencils, scissors, crayons, glue, etc...) on the bottom. Hanging on the wall beside the bookshelf is a "prayers for my children" poster and our "homeschool planning calendar" that I plan to share more about in my next post. The picture is of Grant and I on prom day when we were 17.
Everyone has different ways of organizing their homeschool room and I like being able to get ideas from other moms like these...
It's pretty obvious from our room that I'm not following an unschooling model of learning. Homeschooling for us means learning at home, much of the same things my kids would learn if they attended public school. Our decision to homeschool was not a negative reaction to the school system in our area, but a desire to spend more time in our kid's lives, be their main influence, develop meaningful family relationships, be in control of their education, and teach from a Biblical worldview.
We can't wait to start this school year on August 18th!
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