Last week I wrote a post about our curriculum choices for this years home school experience. I ran across the “Not” Back to School Blog Hop hosted by the iHomeschool Network and decided to join in on the fun. If you are interested in joining in follow the link on the left to get all the exciting details. Week 2 in this four week hop is focusing on the school room. As I mentioned last week, I thought this hop was especially fun because one area of our lives I have not wrote much about is our home school adventures.
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| photo source:http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ |
I am sure, I will not be the first to say that our School Room encompasses more than one individual room. In fact, we try to make learning experiences out of as many things and places as we can. I suppose you could say that the world is our school room!
However, we also have seat work time that requires a comfortable place for us to work, gather, and even stay organized. Our home is not large enough to afford us a separate schoolroom, so we improvised and found that with some careful organization we could turn a dining area into a great educational area also. So our dining room that before held our fish friends and a clock, has the addition of a handsome bookshelf and a white board. Although both additions are very simple they made a large difference in our school time. Having a dedicated area to serve our needs helped to simplify our supplies, and of course made the best use of the time we have.
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| Craft Closet |
Our spaces is limited so we also utilize a large closet in our laundry room, and we have an extra book shelf in the family room for the books that serve as story time and quiet time books. We also enjoy supplementing our curiosity with books from our local library. One day I dream of having something similar to library style wall shelving in our living room that will stylishly display our much loved book collections, in addition to keeping them all together in one room.
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Kids’ Craft Time and Free time Space
Curriculum Shelf Before Pictures: Curriculum Shelf After Pictures:
Until that day we make the best use of the space that we can, while still maintaining some sort of order and the least amount of distraction as we can. Our book collection has grown a lot since we married, but we both agree whether we schooled our children at home or not we wouldn’t change it! Our space is limited, but there are many placed that learning takes place. Math happens in our kitchen as we learn measurements and we fill cups. History occurs as we travel and we get to visit landmarks, historical sites, and national monuments. Citizenship has recently been demonstrated as Husband has had the duty of participating in jury duty, this of course brought us to the library to research further our legal system, and the concepts of civil duties. Music learning happens often in our home as I LOVE music. Art is everywhere, and teaching it is fun!
Our outdoors space has helped to teach the children how plants grow, what it takes to care for them, and the different things that cause our plant friends stress. We also have learned patients as we wait for our plant friends to recover from those stresses, as we wait for our blossoms to finally bloom, and as we wait to see if that special plant we gave a home last year ever decides to wake up this year. Harvesting our garden also brings up more kitchen fun, frugal lessons, and of course history as we discuss how food was gathered and preserved throughout different times. Sharing our garden rewards brings many lessons in sharing and giving, and even the good old barter system.
We may not have a fancy space for school, we may not sit down for countless hours, we may be a little unconventional, but we have fun, learn a lot, and get to learn from experiances as they come.
~Shy Willow