We've officially started our trek into the land of homeschooling. Although we feel like learning is always going on in our home, it's quite fun to actually have a means and method to go along with it. Not that we don't chuck it out the window whenever it is convenient for us! ;-) Buddy and Button are very excited that they finally get to touch the school stuff. We actually started a week earlier than I had planned because I couldn't keep them away any longer!
So what are we doing?
Some days it feels like we are doing a lot and then other days nothing at all. This stage is great because we have no outside factors that need to weigh in on what needs to happen on any given day or anything that needs to be tested or recorded. Basically, Pre-K can be just plain fun! If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I'm in love with the Charlotte Mason method. We're trying to follow her method as much as possible with time out in nature, reading great books, doing handicrafts, and just learning through living.
What does it look like?
I've tried to set-up our Pre-K time to be as easy prep time for me as possible. I learned when I prematurely tried to do preschool with Buddy a couple of years ago that prepping a lot of stuff every week or even every day leads to early burn-out. I didn't want that this time around.
I created flexible schedule that I laminated and posted to our dishwasher. Each subject is laminated with a little velcro dot on the back for easy removal since every day is a little bit different. I made a table that shows me what I want to do with the boys on any given day and I've posted it on the inside of my cabinet above my dishwasher. The little envelope below holds all the other subjects that we might use on different days. The great thing about this is that some days we don't get to everything so I can leave it up for the next day and just switch things around as the week goes on. The table is more of a guideline than a hard fast rule.
Our house is quite small. We live in an 1100 sq. ft. home so anywhere and everywhere is our school room. We've actually converted our master bedroom into an office/school room/library, but it is quite dark so we don't usually spend much time in it unless we are on the computers. When we are at home, we do most of our reading on the couches in the living room or if our work requires a hard surface, we find ourselves at the kitchen table or kids craft table that is also located in the kitchen.
One of the other wonderful blessings about homeschooling is that we aren't restricted to a particular location in which we can do school. This is most easily seen when we do our nature walks, but we've also found the joys of working from coffee shops. (Daddy also works from home and likes to work at coffee shops from time to time, so now we just join him - but at a different table. ;-) )
Where do we keep all our stuff?
Again with a small house, we find that our homeschooling stuff is everywhere. Most of it is in the office/school room/library, but we have another couple of bookcases in the living room and some of our Bible/devotional books can be found on the baker's rack near the kitchen table. A lot of our "work" is also "play" so some of what we pull out for school time are actually toys that are stored in the boys room as well.
This is our library...
Except for it being so dark (I'm hoping to put a skylight in at some point), I really like this room. We have a desk in the corner with the family computer (i.e. the computer the kids are allowed to use... sometimes). A more recent addition is the "desk" right next to it. This was actually Buddy's old dresser from Ikea, but one of the drawers had completely broken off. We just took the bottom drawers off and viola! Mama gets her very own desk!
The bookcase has a variety of different things in it. Most of it is now homeschool stuff. Sadly, most of mama and daddy's books from before kids live in boxes out in daddy's office. We kept some of our most-favorite books out though, and they live in the top two rows. Each square of the bookcase in the bottom rows contains a different subject matter. This makes it really easy when I see that I need to pull out something for, say, our fine motor skills activity of the day. I just go to that particular box, and pick something out. Sometimes I don't even plan it in advance. I just grab whatever I think will be most interesting to them that day or maybe something that will travel well for times we study outside or at coffee shops.
Our other big resource is our bookcase in the living room.
This is another one of my favorite spaces. Our top shelf contains many of our kid games and puzzles. The next shelf has a lot of our better literature for children. We have My Bookhouse series, Aesop's Fables, Treasury of Children's Literature, Winnie-the-Pooh, and many others. The next shelf has a lot more regular kids books that we've collected over the years. We have a lot of the Ambleside Online Year 0 books plus others. The fourth shelf is quite eclectic for now. It has some toys, it is where we keep our library books, and the red bin contains all our easy readers for Buddy to read on his own when he's ready. The bottom shelf contains many of our scrapbooks that the boys' grandmother has made for our family.
And that, my friends, is our set-up. There is so much more that we are doing in our Pre-K, but that will have to be for another post!
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