Our Classroom

I know that not everyone has a school room, or a room that is solely dedicated to their homeschool.  And, I feel so fortunate that Jon is willing to work in one of our large closets in our bedroom so that we can have a room for school.  Especially this year, which is our "transition" year.

This is our den that is right off the front door of our house.  It used to be Jon's office, but he has since moved up to our closet for the last three months or so.  When he started recording presentations, he found that the room echoed a lot.  So, he moved part of his desk into one of our spacious closets in our room ... and because it is a much smaller space his echoes in his recordings are almost non-existent.  Which means that we get to use the den for school!  He left his "big" portion of his desk in here for us to use as a table.  And, I put our "little" computer desk in the corner for Kaladin and all of my stuff for teaching.  Behind Kaladin is our base for our Time Tracker Tags.  LOVE those!  We use them for everything ... TV time, computer time, 5-minute math exercises, rotating through stations, times out, cleaning ... everything!

My three oldest children are accustomed to a public school atmosphere, so I've tried to make our den as much like a public school room as possible ... without all the unnecessary items for homeschooling.  Because Adam is still learning the days of the week and the months of the calendar, we have a calendar on the wall that we've been using in our morning meetings this week.  And, so far, I love it.  We've been able to talk about the date and during our first week of school, we've already talked about two of their cousins who had birthdays.  It was wonderful to talk about their cousins and remember them on their birthdays.

These are the children's work stations, storage stations, whatever you want to call them.  I place their work in their drawers ... one drawer for each subject, similar to the workbox system (without all the numbers).  The small drawer units on the top house all of their supplies (pencils, crayons, glue sticks, erasers, etc.).  Next to each small drawer unit is a magnetic white board (which are actually colored).  Eventually I'll hang these on the wall above their carts.  And, next to that are their binders and notebooks that they aren't using (since we do science twice a week and history on the opposite two days, there is always one notebook up there when we aren't using it).

The shelves next to their carts house all of our "extra" stuff.  The small drawer units have permanent markers, white out, elastics, etc., all of my office supplies.  There is a black drawer unit we got from my mom that has pens and pencils in it, and on top of that there is a box with all of the extra boxes of crayons that I bought on sale.  There is also the Bucket Balance for math, our math Wrap Ups, Andrew's spelling flashcards, math flashcards and other math manipulatives.  On the bottom two shelves I've stacked our paper stash: construction paper, lined paper, graph paper, cardstock, printer paper.  I also put all of the binders my mom gave us from her office (they weren't using them anymore), in which we will eventually put the children's work for the year ... so they can see their progress. 

This is the computer station.  The children will do their Spanish and Typing lessons here.  I ordered some educational computer games, but after they got here I realized that they wouldn't run on our operating systems.  So, I'll have to find some more.  I've turned off the wireless adapter on the laptops, so the children can't connect to the internet to play games on the internet.  Best thing I've ever done!  It's also so close to the wall that not everyone can crowd around behind the children on the computers.

Here's the front side of the computer station.  All of the books that we aren't using (or the ones that I tear pages out of) are on the shelves on the top-right.  The two sections on the top-left have the writing program, some illustrated classics (that I found in the $1 section at Target), and some magazine holders (which have other workbooks in them).  The bottom four boxes have: art supplies, DVDs, math manipulatives and flash cards, and literacy activities.

Well, there's our home classroom.  It's still a work in progress, but I love it.  Everything is right where I need it to be.  And, the children take turns on the computers and the table, so it all works out okay without everyone having their own desks (which I'd really like one day).