A tour of our school room

Since this is the first time we have had a dedicated school room, I wanted to share it with you. When I first started homeschooling my intent was to never have a school room, because in the many books and blogs I read, school rooms were often equated with “compartmentalizing” learning in one’s home.

However, as time went on I realized where we study really makes no difference to our mindset, because learning has become a very natural part of our daily rhythm whether we are at home, in the car, the grocery store, or at afternoon activities. I also realized that if I want to give my boys an organized, inspiring, and engaging work space that they can really make their own, we needed to have a dedicated room, otherwise the daily set up for me took time away from learning and our main living space was always piled with books, papers, and projects.

In Hawaii I split our office space with a school space, now in our new home we have a full room to ourselves. It has been great fun putting it together and now it is one of our favorite rooms in the house, because it is colorful, flooded with sunlight, and we have such a great time learning together.

We also use the dining area for art projects, the kitchen for science experiments, the play room for imaginative play, the reading room for story time…you see where I am going, having a school room has not prevented learning from happening elsewhere, it has simply allowed us to be more organized and use a lot of visual learning aids on the walls. So now, on with the tour…

Our Animals of the World map (bought at Costco), continental map for our geography studies, elements of drawing chart for Drawing with Children, writing chart for letters and numbers, Damian’s alphabet and number charts, our Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom palm tree with our two main alphabet books at the bottom of it.

Next to this area is a book case that holds supplies, reference books, work folders, and manipulatives. We also have a two door built in cupboard that has shelves for more storage.

Our school song, as decorated by my two boys. This is next to our circle time area, since we sing our school song every morning.

Calendar and weather portion of our circle time area, beneath this, which I forgot to take a photo of, is a rug and big floor cushions for us to sit on while we say prayers, do our virtue learning, sing our school song, and go through the calendar/weather activities. I am in the process of re-working our virtue learning poster which is usually in this area of our classroom, I will share it when it is completed.

Our white board, which we use for all kinds of things. I keep it at ground level so it is easy for the boys to work on too.

Our electronic globe which is still a favorite.

Our feature study area – whether it is a science, history, or geography unit we are working on – we keep all the books, posters, and manipulatives in this area, so that while we are studying the subject, the boys can easily come and do further investigation or re-use the manipulatives.

Our activity and work boxes – I did away with workboxes for Damian, since he and I work together through all of his work now, and converted them into activity boxes (I will do a full post on these soon, because they have proven to be very popular with the boys and helpful to me in teaching two students doing very different levels of work). The workboxes are Rylan’s and he works through them in the mornings after our circle time, while I am focused on working one-on-one with Damian.

My area labels as seen above were all done on my computer, laminated and I glued on the wood deco animals (or a castle, which you can see on our “reading nook” sign below), which I purchased from Michaels for 25c each.

“Education is the indispensible foundation of all human excellence”. A banner I made across the school room wall from a quotation from the Writings of Baha’u’llah. A reminder of why we work so hard to learn! I will change this quotation banner a few times during the course of the year, re-using the same letters.

Our Baha’i Holy Places and Houses of Worship wall which we are adding to as we study the continents in geography.

The Golden Rule poster – a quotation or verse from all the major world religions referring to the golden rule of treating others the way we would wish to be treated.

Our reading nook – this is just a small reading corner in our school room, we also have a reading/library room downstairs next to the play room.

And that is a peek into our school space!

This has been added to Preschool Corner & 5K too.

Learning about the Baha’i calendar

The boys and I start most of our days with circle time (the reason I say “most” is because some days we have activities in the morning outside of the home, like Damian’s Music Together class, so those days we only have prayers together). Our circle time has always included calendar time, during which we learn about the days of the week and the months of the Gregorian calendar.

I have taught my boys about the Baha’i calendar before, but I wanted to make it a more regular part of this calendar learning time. I made this Baha’i calendar to add to the circle time area of our school room to illustrate the 19 months of the year (each made up of 19 days).

I decorated a clothes pin which we will use to mark the months as we go through the year. On the first day of each month the boys will take turns moving the clothes pin to mark the new month. We will learn about the name and meaning of the name of that new month (the months of the Baha’i calendar are all named after the attributes of God, such as Splendor, Glory, Grandeur, Knowledge, Love, Mercy). On a regular basis (maybe daily, because the boys love the singing part of our circle time) we will sing the Baha’i calendar song “Song of the Months” by Doug Cameron so we memorize the names and order of the months. I have other calendar activities planned for the year, which I will share with you as we go through them.

I printed the calendar from this site, glued it on to cardboard and laminated it for more durability (please note: you must glue the paper and cardboard together prior to laminating them, because if they are not glued, when you cut the calendar out, the paper and cardboard will separate, each being laminated on only one side).

For the clothes pin: I took a regular wooden clothes pin, colored it blue using a permanent marker, wrote “This month” on it using a black permanent marker, and then made and laminated a small 9 pointed star, which I stuck to the end of the clothes pin using a glue dot.

A beautiful, colorful addition to our circle time.

Our “school song”

I thought it would be nice to have a school song that we could put up on our classroom wall and sing every morning during our circle time. We wanted it to be something meaningful, something to guide our behavior and motivations. We chose this quotation from the Baha’i Writings:

“Strive that your actions day by day may be beautiful prayers. Turn towards God, and seek always to do that which is right and noble. Enrich the poor, raise the fallen, comfort the sorrowful, bring healing to the sick, reassure the fearful, rescue the oppressed, bring hope to the hopeless, shelter the destitute!”

- ‘Abdu'l-Baha

I printed and laminated the quotation, and put it up on the wall in our circle time area, but in the next couple of week, the kids are going to be decorating a larger version of it for our wall. I will share this with you when it is completed.

Nurturing virtue: “The Good in Me from A to Z by Dottie”

I apologize, I know it is not good form to say I am back and then disappear for a week! BUT the kids and I were hit with a nasty bug that has kept us home and in bed for a whole week! So, we really haven’t been up to much this past week, but I wanted to share something we did together the week before.

We spent several mornings during circle time reading through the book “The Good in Me from A to Z” and working on the accompanying workbook. It is a sweet little book, easy to read and understand. We read through the book once, then we went back to the beginning and discussed in detail the virtue each page was describing. I also asked them for examples on how they used that virtue in their own lives.

The next morning I pulled the book out again and read through it. This time I gave each of them a copy of the page at the back of the book, which asks them to write or draw the good in them. I asked them to tell me about one of their good qualities. Damian said the “good in me is my heart” and Rylan said “the good in me is that I love to read and learn”. These are the pictures they drew to illustrate these qualities.

“The Good in Me from A to Z” has a workbook that goes along a with it too. We used several of the activity sheets during the course of the week, and I am sure I will use them again as we continue to work through specific virtues in more detail.

A sweet addition to our circle time

Just a few days ago I posted pictures of our circle time area. A couple days later I spent some time looking through one pretty thing because it feels like ages since I have been crafting…and I found these super cute posters.

I printed them straight away, laminated them, and added them to our circle time area.

Now we also sing from 1-10 (I am going to make a 10-20 chart to go with it) and the ABC song for Damian. Although he knows both already, and can identify some of the letters and numbers, as we sing I am pointing to the corresponding number/letter so that his confidence grows in this area. Eventually I will ask him to do the pointing for us, when he is good at that, then we will make a game out of it, Rylan and I calling out a number or letter and see how fast he can find the right one. I think we will have lots of fun learning time with these cute charts.

You can download these charts from Sprik Space blog, and there are even several colors to choose from, how cool is that!

Happy weekend to you! :)