This summer we relocated our classroom from an upstairs spare room back down to the dining room. For years and years, we had school in the dining room and I used to say that our home was decorated in "Early American Homeschool". We were used to the homeschool clutter......bookshelves with crates and papers, stacks of books on the dining room table, maps and posters on the wall.
No more! I really liked having my dining room look like a dining room, and I have no real desire to return to "Early American Homeschool" decorating style.
So what to do? School must be relocated because the "spare" room is becoming a boys bedroom. So I converted an adjacent coat closet into a school closet and created the disappearing classroom.
Here is how it works. I pull out the supplies for the day. I have an organizer for all our pencils, pens, crayons, scissors, etc. I have a magazine holder to keep paper sized posters handy and visible. I put all the supplies needed for the day in a crate so it is all readily accessible. I place our AAS spelling board on the side table. All in all, takes me less than a minute.
After we are done with school, I do a quick view of the next days schedule. I place all books needed for the next day into the crates. Then I place everything back into the closet.
I still have our workboxes but I am using them differently. Each drawer has all the books for a specific subject on our MFW grid. There is a drawer for all the books used in the Bible grid, another for all the geography books, and another for each and every section. This makes it easy for me to get each specific book for each subject.
Here is our disappearing classroom....
We were off to such a great start! Big Bro' came in for a visit the first two weeks of May then the bummer summer started.The rest of May and June were dominated by illness and family visits. Urgent care visits, weeks laying around on the couch with sick kids. It's all a blur. We had company the few weeks that everyone was feeling well. Very little school happened in May or June.July started well and then I got sick. My second ER visit of the summer resulted in a 4 day hospital stay, a surgery, and a couple of follow up procedures. Bummer Summer!We usually get quite a bit of school done and spend several days at the beach each week. This summer we watched way too much tv and got out of the habit of doing school.We only did 5 weeks of school since my last post.....actually 4 1/2 weeks since April 27 but who's counting. During this little bummer summer season of our lives I made a few decisions and discoveries. 1. Charlotte really loves 100 Easy lessons. I had taught my older children to read with this resource but found that it interfered too much with Sam's Speech Therapy. Charlotte doesn't have any speech issues and 100 EZ lessons is a perfect little fit while she matures before using MFW 1st. 2. We are doing the parts of MFW K that we skipped this past year when Charlotte was tagging along with Adventures. This is providing us with enough activities to keep us going until April.2. Sam's reading level advance 2 grade levels! I spent this past year slowing down reading intruction and much of what I wrote about was in regards to Sam's reading. I now have proof that it worked! We will continue our reading plan. 3. Sam has improved from struggling to write "He was a tall man." to doing all of his writing in school. This is so awesome. So we will continue our writing plan. 4. Sam enjoyed using Writing Strands but we will put this resource on the shelf for a year. I want him to be able to use WS independantly and he is almost ....but not quite ....there. We have started the process of getting back into the habit of school. The bummer summer is behind us, and we are looking foward to cooler weather and a healthier family!
