August 16, 2013

School Room 2013

Stephanie School Room, Tips and Tricks 26 Comments

Well as promised, here is the tour of our school room for the year! I have to say I have added quite a bit of homey elements to make it more like a room then a school. I wanted learning to be comfortable and feel like a part of life, not something that we do only in one place. Another difference is that I have places a great emphasis on art and creating. As I mentioned before, I love the book (and blog) the Artful Parent. This idea of making your family artful by allowing art to happen, made me think about making our homeschool an artful homeschool. I want to make learning something that really inspired them to create and make it theirs. So there is lots of art materials and space to work. I also added some more of those childrens art frames that open to pop in a new paper easily! I love that it give the girls work a sense of importance and it also makes things feel warm and cozy! Another thing I did was make a chalk board for our studies. I realized that we used our little chalk board a lot last year and I wanted a bigger one. I couldn’t find one, so I made it (my hubbie helped out a bit)! It turned out really well and I love how it looks! Finally, when I reorganized our school room in the spring I moved things all around so that there was no subject specific areas. Thing were placed where they fit best and where they looked prettiest. This was fine, but I realized that having things arranged by subject made more sense for me and for the girls. So back in order things went, but I still tried to use a few pieces as decorative to make it look pretty too! Well, you can be the judge! Let me know what you think! I like it. I am sure that we will change things as we go and you will it! Here is what it looks like now!

This is our Art Shelf.

Here is my chalk board! I think it is so pretty! I think we will really make a lot of use of this!

This is our sensorial area (more or less). This is all out because I know that when we have friends over, these are all things that we can share easily!

This is botany, weaving, practical life trays (I haven’t made them yet) and our bells.

This is our language area. The basket of animals are going to be the base of our grammar work! I plan to use them instead of the farm. We can make sentences using aniamls and landscapes from different continents! Thus combining our geography and language!

This is a little bit more random. we have some geography work on the top part. This is where we will have a changing continent shelf that the girls can decorate each month. On the bottom there are fraction circle, Bunny’s robotics kit, and the geometry sticks.

Finally here is our math area! You can see all the regular math works! Bead fram, golden beads, sandpaper numbers, etc.

Here is an overview of the shelves so you can see it all together!

Here is our main work table. I have some new frames here and also our nature tray! I think it looks much better! I made a geography inspired art set for the area. I love this Mother Thresa quote. It seemed perfect!

This is Pup’s work area and the stairs upstairs.

This is Bunny’s desk. You can see she is already making her area hers! 🙂

So there you have it! What do you think? I really like it! I think that it is a beautiful space and I hope that it will help make learning a bit more fun. Some how having the best space possible seems to make learning more inspiring and important. Don’t you think? How is your learning space? What does it look like? Leave a link! I love to see where others are learning! Happy Schooling!