Back to School –School Room

   School Room Week

Over at ihomeschoolnetwork.com they are hosting a Not Back-to-School Blog Hop.

This week’s feature is School Rooms. As our family has grown, what was once our school room has become a bedroom, so over the years we have literally lived in our homeschool room.  Our house is one of those you walk in and say, “oh, you must homeschool.”  This definitely has its benefits – along with its drawbacks, but I would rather for the sake of contentment, dwell on the benefits.  We have what we need right in our living space and we have learned to utilize the different areas of our home to benefit our homeschooling day.

 I am a very visual person, so I like to see the things we are learning.  These are the doors to our “coat closet” in our kitchen.  We do not keep coats in this closet, but homeschool books and materials. On these doors are our Biography, Composer, Artist and Poet of the Month Poster Boards.  I also have a Language Arts Poster and a wall chart that we can put scriptures  or the words to a poem we are memorizing. 

    

This year we will be studying World Geography and Missions, so our Biographies will highlight the Missionary we are covering each month. We also have a world map on the kitchen wall under our “Jewish Festivals” shelf.     I use a combination of Charlotte Mason, Montessori, Lifestyle of Learning, and Unit Study approach to Homeschooling.  You will see a flair of each of these styles in the activities we incorporate in our homeschooling week.




On the side of our kitchen table, I have a little table that will house my office apprentice.  This is an awesome tool, and hopefully will help me to keep our kitchen table clear of books and curriculum this year.

Also in the kitchen I use the side of our kitchen cabinets to post our chore charts and Doorpost discipline posters.    


In our living Room is my desk and a bookshelf with items and books we use regularly.   We also have a set up for Supplies and Craft items -

  

One of my favorite areas in our home is our “Learning Center” -   
On the far left are our continent boxes -  

Each of the drawers hold items for one of the continents.  Some of the items in each box are - paper dolls, YWAM young readers Biography, Continent Book, Continent Facts sheets and maps, Little Passports activities, Highlights Top Secret Adventures, Montessori Print Cards, and Animal figures.  Each box will have some extra items in them, depending on what I have found over the years to put in them.  I am really excited to use these items full force this year as we study World Geography.  I will be posting about them and how we use these, throughout the year.

On the door to our garage (I told you we utilize every area) we have our calendar and a poster board which highlights different things we are learning.  I also post each week the Character Trait, Bible Verse and Habit we are working on.

We us a modified version of the Workboxes.  In the Learning Center I have crates for each of the girls in their school color. (I have color coded my kids from the very beginning of our homeschool adventure – 16 years ago) – In these crates are their binders and schedule notebooks.  

This is my Golden Girls box and binders.     

 I found these folders at the $ store in each of the girls colors. I bought 6 for each of the girls to represent the 6 different areas that we cover each day.  Inside the folders are four double sided pockets.  I use each pocket to cover different elements of that subject.  For example in the Language Arts folder there would be a pocket for Spelling, Grammar, Reading/Phonics, Penmanship/Copy Work, etc.  I will also be doing a post on our workbox system in more detail soon, along with some of the forms I have made for our use of them.

On the side of the “Learning Center” is a pocket holder I found a few years ago at Target’s $ spot.  This works great to store their chore chart check off lists and their check in/out school signs - they flip it over then school is started and then back again after school is competed.   

Go over to the "Not" Back-to-School Blog Hop to check out other families school rooms.

We are getting closer to being “back-to-school” soon~