Our 2013-14 Homeschool Room

Good morning! It’s another new week here at Look! We’re Learning! and we’re ready to get started!

I’m fully engulfed in the “back to school” spirit and I’ve been sharing our homeschool plans for this year recently. Last week, we featured our homeschool curriculum choices for 3rd, K, and PK. Today we’re sharing pictures of our homeschool room for this year.

 Our Homeschool Room

We don’t really have a dedicated homeschool room (as much as I wish we did). So we have to make do with what we have, right? 🙂

As you can see, our homeschool room doubles as our dining room. If you’ve seen our previous post about homeschooling in a small space, then you already know our basic setup. We did make a few changes this year, though.

We’re keeping our reward coupon system this year, but we’re going to make a few changes to it. We’re not exactly sure what our basis for handing our Play Bucks will be yet. I’m leaning toward adapting it to their schoolwork, but we’re undecided for now.

One thing we did decide on was the need for a better daily schedule. We’ll be sharing our detailed schedule in a couple of weeks, but we’ve already instituted a simple picture schedule to give the kids a heads-up on what we’re doing each day.

To make it, I just downloaded the free workbox tags from Homeschool Creations and then laminated them and added velcro. That way, we can just add and remove subjects based on what we’re doing that day.

The long wall in the room houses our picture world map, our chalkboard, our fruitage of the spirit “tree”, and a beautiful piece of artwork we picked up recently.

Isn’t that beautiful? We bought it at the Liberated Minds Homeschool Expo. The title is “Plant Da Seeds And They Will Grow” and it’s by an artist named Jah Peeps. I love how the “tree of knowledge” is supplemented with books about topics such as love, wisdom, and truth.

Those are several of the core values we try to instill in our children. It was very moving to me that, when the children receive that kind of foundation, they feel comfortable in life – just like the picture shows.

Here’s a close-up view of our picture world map. We love this map because it’s full of pictures that automatically capture the kids’ interest. They ask questions on their own: “What’s that animal?” “What’s that building?” It gives us a simple way to stir up enthusiasm for geography.

I still keep all of our books for the year in a crate next to the bookshelf. These are the same books we featured in our homeschool curriculum post for last week, along with our first read-aloud. Can you guess what it is by looking at the author? (We’ll be sharing our reading list soon.)

One change we made was to designate one wall as our themed chart space. We’ll be rotating out charts through the year that relate to the topics we cover.

Fractions are coming up soon.

As is a discussion on the properties of light.

We still keep most of our supplies in our bookcase. Our basic homeschool tools (binding machine, laminator, and pencil sharpener) are right on top.

The top shelf holds dry erase markers, chalkboard erasers, pencils, pens, and some art supplies. We also have most of the books in the Core Knowledge Series and my trusty homeschool binder. The second row is where we keep individual workboxes that we’ll be using off and on during the year and a basket with several of the Children’s Busy Books. (Look for us to share some of our activities from those in the future.)

The last shelf is where we keep more art supplies: paints, crayons, brushes, etc. On the right side, I keep our homeschool records in a portable filing box. We’ve never been visited by any truancy officers or school district representatives, but I like to have our documents ready in case that happens.

And that’s our homeschool space! It’s small but we make it work! We’d love to see pictures of your homeschooling rooms! Feel free to tell us about them in the comments!

This post is part of the iHomeschool Network “Not Back to School” Blog Hop! Visit our fellow bloggers and link up your own posts by clicking the image below!