Making Space

OK, so this week at I Homeschool Network is school room week. Honestly, I'd love to have a room entirely dedicated to school. Instead we have areas, and that's perfectly OK too...

Most of the time our lessons are done in the dining room

Yes, that's food stains on a sheet used as a table cloth (lol)
and in that cupboard (used tv stand) resides our play dough and other "fun" stuff.

and this area ...

This is "sort of" a school room. It doubles as our side door and home for the Christmas tree
in December. This is where the girls do the majority of their lessons.

This is where we do our morning binders, math, language arts, and the majority of our crafting and science experiments. I literally turned 45* to take the picture of ECJ helping YCJ after taking the shot of the dining room table. The carpeting under their feet is a really dense tightly woven carpet with concrete mixed into the base. It likes to resist staining and beads water (at least for a few minutes) ... seriously, the kids have spilled red Kool Aide on that carpet, had raspberry fights, and smooshed crayons into it and there's not one stain!!

ECJ, being a "pre-teen" and in those middle school years has his desk set up in his room...

Relatively small mess for a 12 year old boy I think...

This is where he does most of his history and science studies while the girls do theirs in the main room with me. He'll also come in here if he's having trouble concentrating, if he's making us have trouble concentrating, or if a certain math problem is giving him the growls. He reads like to tomorrow lounging on his futon in all sorts of weird positions (upside down and in a pretzel are some of his favorites). 

My computer, which everyone uses since I've taken the laptops off of the WiFi connection (certain boys getting up at all hours of the night and playing games online), sits across the room from our main schooling area. Everyone gets on it at some point or another during the day time.

My printing station is right next to it and this makes it wonderfully easy to grab that item I forgot to print out, look up that thing we forgot to look up, or grab a moment of levity with a YouTube video we've been meaning to watch. I also play a lot of our music from my computer which means that it's really best located right where it is. 

Other than this we "do" school nearly everywhere. Everywhere we go we're learning. We spend a TON of time at our local library, take several nature walks a week, have spent long hours (combined) at our local parks and play grounds studying thanks to smart phones that allow us to look up new facts on the fly, and like to spread a blanket in the yard and do our lessons picnic style. As YCJ has blossomed with her reading I've enjoyed turning corners and finding her reading in bed, to her sister, or on the living room floor to the dogs when she's supposed to be finishing up a lesson!

And while we have the main schooling area (which, OK, is the whole center of my house pretty much) we love learning everywhere. A quick trip to the riverside leads to endless new knowledge that Daddy and I didn't even know before when we discover the Brig Niagara (reconstructed and refinished) which was in the Battle of Lake Erie and all sorts of fascinating facts to go with it (including how much the captain of such a ship would have brought in annually).

Learning happens everywhere. So, even though most of the pictures of our lessons are taken in our "learning areas" we're learning almost all the time! And isn't that one of the best things about homeschooling?

Check out last week's post Curriculum Choices '14-'15 (and follow the link in that post to last week's link up for Curriculum while you're there). Next week we'll all be blogging about our students and giving you some neat photos of them for the upcoming (current) school year!!

And for those of you who have yet to look us up on Facebook you can find us there by following this link . As yet it is the only social media account we can be found at.