The "Classroom"

Our house isn't big enough for a real classroom but I'm getting the dining room ready to serve it's purpose... it has a lot of purposes. That poor room. It's the kids' library, the piano room, the pantry, the dining room and now it's also the classroom. hehe! The poor overworked room.
The above picture is the bookshelf, next to it are my craft supplies and FHE stuff. There are also two small boxes of the kids' individual stuff like a pencil bag of crayons and their scissors. Next to that are two diaper boxes but I've replaced those w/ crates now. The top one is the Sunday box and the bottom one has books we don't use anymore and tempera paint.

This is the other bookshelf. It holds the piano music and photo albums but the top shelf is used for homeschool supplies.

Here are my trifold boards opened. I will open them only for school time and then put them away later. One is for weather and the other is the word wall. We just don't have room for them otherwise so they're on tri-fold boards that I can fold back up and stick behind a chair. :)

I put this rectangle up there b/c I don't have a cork board. It will be to display their artwork and projects in.

Collin has been asking a lot of questions about states and America and stuff so I thought we could learn a bit about the states this year and the Pledge of Allegiance. On the window are window cling letters. Then, on the right side of the window are aprons for when we work in the kitchen and "experiment." hehe!

I think we're all set for now. Now we just have to wait until Aug 2 to start our "classes". hehe! I'm excited. I was even really shocked b/c as I was putting the words on the Word Wall for this picture, Collin knew all the words except "away". hehe! Surprised me!
And, if you're wondering, most of the wall decorations I found at the dollar store.

plans for 2010-2011

Well, we're preparing for a new year. I will have one 4-K and one 2-K this year. I want to make sure that I will be able to homeschool so this year I'm going to follow all the laws required for SC. That means that we have to have 180 days of school that last 4 1/2 hrs each day. I have to keep attendance, a diary of everything we do and a portfolio of the kids' work. I found a cool program, that's free if you get the basic, online that keeps track of most of this stuff on the computer. I'll still have to keep a portfolio though.That shouldn't be too hard. Especially if I continue with the lapbooks but I haven't decided yet.

We aren't starting back until Aug 2 so I won't have anything exciting to post. I may just put updates of things going on here in preparation but in Aug I'll get back to it. We will be using a curriculum called In His Image so I won't be posting new ideas on here but I thought I could use this blog for the portfolio. I'll scan in samples of the kids' work and things like that. :) I'll also post about stresses or things that worked and ideas I have here.

I know, you are all curious of our schedule for next year. Okay, probably not but I'm going to post it anyways. In order to get our 4.5 hrs in, I've decided to start school at 7:30am. The kids are normally up by 6/6:30 anyways so it will be easy to just start doing school at 7:30. We will go 7:30-12:30 w/ a 30 min break from 9:30-10am for snack and play outside time. 12:30pm we'll have lunch and then nap/quiet time. After nap, we'll go on a nature walk and find something we think is neat and draw a picture of it. If we need to then we can come back home and look it up. I know, that will be more than 4.5 hrs but I'm really not sure if I can stretch out 4K and 2K work to last until 12:30. We may make play time a bit longer and then we can even count that as PE if we want so.... we'll see. We may find that we can cut back a lot but this is what we're planning on for right now. :)