Our School Room (and Kitchen/Dining Room/Office/Mud Room)

Like many homeschoolers, we do not have the space to have a room dedicated to only schooling. Our eat-in kitchen serves also as our office and school room, and mud room of sorts, since the back door is in the middle of it all!  I managed to clean it all up over the summer and start to organize for the new school year.  I quickly took some pictures before it got messed up!  

Here are 4 pictures taken from the 4 corners of our kitchen.  

One wall is our "office" where the computer and shelves hold our office things.  I also keep some craft supplies that I use often for school or projects on the shelves.  Cookbooks are here, as well as curriculum.

We are trying workboxes this year. I bought the pink and blue drawers from Christmas Tree Shops for $6.99.  The brand is Bella Storage Solutions. You can also find them at Kmart sometimes, though I've only seen the colored ones at CTS. Anyway, each child has three of their own and three shared for subjects we do together. 

This was our school table last year, however I have since moved it to the basement and we do school at the big table.  The kids have chairs on which they can rest their feet while writing.  I'd still rather have them at a table that fits their size, but it's the next best thing. 

The china cabinet doubles as school space. The magnetic white board is used for Calendar and hundreds chart. Everythings on magnets so it can easily be removed for writing space on the board.

Our First Day of Homeschooling

While I am sure I won’t be motivated to blog every school day, I thought it would be good and fun to blog our very first day. Our curriculum is My Father’s World, Kindergarten, and both children are participating, though this would actually be Asher’s kindergarten year, and Ellie’s PreK year.  But they both are ready to do the work at this level.

Our school-time discipline system is this traffic light.  It was inspired by a former co-worker of mine who used this in her classroom.  When I was thinking about what I could use for our homeschool discipline, this was the perfect answer because Asher LOVES traffic lights!  He was very motivated and wanted his car to stay on green.  I don’t think he even cared about the consequences that go with yellow or red, he just didn’t want his car to be on them! 

We started the day getting dressed and making beds before breakfast. Ellie wanted to get Schatzie ready for school too, so she combed her legs and

beard.  

  

Here’s a few pictures of our first day of school breakfast – nothing fancy – just cereal!

The first thing they did was to listen to me read day one of the creation story from the Bible.  Then they answered some questions about it.  They did very well sitting, listening, and remembering the story!

Then, they practiced writing their names.

Next, they cut out the number one which illustrated day one of creation, taped paper together to make a poster, and glued the number one onto the poster.  They’ll add numbers 2-7 in the following days for each day of creation.

After that we took a little break outside to ride bikes.  Then we came back in to review the alphabet (Asher’s knows this, of course, but it’s good for Ellie, and the point right now is to have easy work to establish the routines).

Then they worked on the first page of our creation book, shown here:

The last activity was to sing “My Father’s World.”  I found a you tube video with the Praise Baby version of this song, which they are familiar with since they used to listen to it to go to sleep!  It also had pictures and words.  Incidentally, there are a lot of great children’s songs like that on you tube.  They enjoyed watching some of them after “My Father’s World.”

Overall, we had a great day!  The skills we practiced were listening, comprehension, self-control, cutting, writing, gluing (fine motor), letter recognition, and ordinal numbers. Can’t wait to do it again tomorrow!