pinterest-dd591.htm Oak Creek Academy: Where is your class room?

Monday, August 9, 2010

Where is your class room?

Not Back to School Blog Hop
At Heart of the Matter, it is "Not Back to School Blog Hop: School Rooms" week {click here to see post}.

As a homeschooling family, school happens many different places, mostly where ever appropriate, comfortable, room/area best equipped with the things we need! Have you ever tried teaching math and money at a register and the cashier just blurts out the answer? We have!! LOL

Anyway, from Wednesday on, last week, I had an insane idea that I could get my house clean and staged, just so, that the pictures of our various school rooms would be perfect. Then HELLO, reality set in and it's not so staged. What follows are some of the areas we school in, but quite honestly, I could have easily taken hundreds of pictures for where we school (anyone want to see the inside of a not so clean van?).

Probably our most favorite room is the living room because it has the Lazy boy recliners in it. They're nice and cozy, a lot of light comes through the window, and for the last two years it's just where we've gotten a lot of our work accomplished. Plus, the boys and I love to snuggle on the smaller couch to read. Hard to believe that it won't be long before the three of us don't fit on the couch together anymore. Also, our tv is in there, which surprisingly isn't a distraction, which makes watching the Math-U-See videos easier.


Our boys absolutely love science! The love to see how things react with one another (especially the brotherly love kind of experiments where one ends up crying ~ I'm not so fond of those ones!!). We've had fun on hikes looking at Beaver dam's, looking at erosion, and other wild life. Also fun, science wise, was the time a couple years ago, when we worked on chemical reactions. So, here are pictures our kitchen, mostly cleaned up!

"Stashing" school stuff happens, mostly, in our fireplace room. We've got a number of varying kinds of bookcases in there. It has most of our school related books, arts and crafts type stuff, math manipulatives, file boxes holding current school work. In the winter, it's probably the boys favorite room to work on school stuff if we've got a good fire going!

Also in this room, to the right of the brown bookcase (on the right of this photo) we have a piece of metal hung on the wall, a calendar for the boys, and some cork board. Really thought they would have gotten a bigger kick out of the sheet of metal, but not so much. Hoping to make better use of it this year. Possibly doing stuff with the word magnets we have or with the letters. Oh! Can you see that we have MORE bookcases to be put together in the photo to the left. Love the IKEA shelves that come in flat boxes. These are for the boys rooms for all the books they have. And possibly a few crates of toys!

So, this is a tour of our school rooms. One last thing, we do have maps and things like that. We decided to home school after a couple years of public school and we had already decorated the house. The maps and white boards, when not in use, get stored behind some chairs.

Happy schooling~



P.S. Forgot about the one thing I made for school last year that I really like. I purchase this wire basket when we were first homeschooling to contain the weeks worth of books. Over the years, our curriculum seems to be morphing into other styles of school and not AS many books. I had the thought that dividing the basket into three sections would be a great idea. The sections are labeled "school", "seasonal" (which I intend to change to "mom"), and "returns" as we use a lot of library books. The last one helps on library day to pick up those items that need to go back.

This next picture is a close up of the dividers. I used scrap, thin plywood and tried to paint it like a barn. I had left over letters from another project and was able to spell out the words I wanted. Even have enough letters to spell out "mom" when I get around to it. I just used Elmor's glue to put the letters on.

6 comments:

  1. Just a note to all reading... a while back we had a Home Depot sales guy over and it was obvious to him we were a homeschooling family.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love the metal! My son would love that in his room! How did you hang it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The metal was hung with nails (not finishing nails, which have no head on them - the part you hammer on). I tried to find a couple studs so that it wasn't hanging just on drywall.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Love what you have going on here! Thanks for the Inspiration. Blessings Catherine

    ReplyDelete
  5. I could definitely get comfy in those living room chairs! :) Thanks for sharing and stopping by!

    ReplyDelete
  6. It looks like you have wonderful outdoor opportunities and lots of nature to soak in. Beaver dams- how awesome! I live in concrete suburbia and would love to have more nature.

    Thanks for stopping by my blog, have a great school year!

    ReplyDelete