Finally I have photos to show you of our new home-school area in our living room! Yayness! You'll remember the "before" shot, when we had the 3-seater sofa and the bookshelf with all the videos and TV on them?
We only have this one room to live in during the day. We have a kitchen, which is just big enough to fit a table and chairs in it, at the back of the house leading off this living room, and that is our downstairs. It's tight with four little boys! ;) But surprisingly manageable, seriously! We knew we had to shuffle things about if we were going to home school before we moved somewhere bigger. So, we got rid of the 3-seater sofa, and the bookshelf, boxed a lot of videos up, and bought a few new items for our school area! This was SO much fun for me to organise! The 3-seater sofa covered a patch of floor that had a rectangle of carpet cut away, exposing rough concrete, so I still plan to get a colourful rug to go under the table where that is, but I'll get to that at a later point. I also want to get strong shelving to hold the DVD/CD/video players and the printer too. The computer and TV sit on top of my new classroom cabinet with the sliding doors and barrel lock (you can't tell I'm completely in love with it, can you??). The other stuff that sits with them makes all the "stuff" fill up the surface and it looks messy and cluttered. So I want to improve the way that stuff is stored. But otherwise, here is our "school room" area!
There is all is in front of you (it's not big because we don't have much space!), but here is a more detailed "guided tour"! :) I'm so proud of the little school zone that I've created for educating my children at! :)
Blackboard - yes, we have a blackboard!!! :D I'm so excited about this purchase! I wanted a good display board of some sort, but the choices seemed to be a bulletin board (pins = no-no), a white board (I don't like the look of them so much, they seem kind of "officey" to me), or a blackboard. I loved the look of the blackboards when I started researching things for the school area! I bought liquid chalk markers in a pack of different colours, because those are so bold and bright, and I liked that. They still wipe off with a wet cloth, and most of what I have written on the blackboard is not going to be wiped off. The blackboard displays what we do at school, at a glance, the character trait we are studying each week (this is the only bit I will wipe off and re-write, on a weekly basis), and a Bible verse at the bottom that is our current memory verse (our first one!) and also our source to point out and talk through with the boys every single time we discipline them for disobeying or being rude to us at the moment. Arthur and Matthew almost have this memorized, just from us repeating it over and over. I have been dropping more and more words as I say it to them, and they fill in the gaps. We will keep this verse there permanently as it's part of our discipline method as well as a memory verse.
Next to the blackboard we have Arthur's magnetic calendar which we got him for Christmas last year. He loves it, and it's great to finally be able to display it properly somewhere. The first thing we do before starting school in the morning is to set the calendar. I found a supremely cute peg to hang it on, and I love that it happens to have a bus with "school bus" on the side! ;) I originally liked it for the bright colours and cute design, before I realised the bus was a school bus. Sorry about the glare/angle on this photo - it makes my eyes feel funny to look at it, but I haven't got a better one for now:
Above the blackboard and calendar, I wanted to put a clock that just had numbers and hands, and which was clear (to help them learn to tell the time) but colourful. It took me ages to find one I liked, and I'm really happy with the one I put up on our school wall! :)
Above the clock I knew I wanted to display the button numbers we made for a craft activity a few weeks after Benjamin was born. Matthew and Arthur and I worked on these over several days when the two little ones were sleeping, and it was a fun, relaxed activity for us. I bought a bumper pack of buttons for crafts from a school supplier (very cheap!) and we used our
squidgy sparkles numbers as templates (after the boys played with them for a while) and drew round them on card, cut them out, and the boys glued buttons of their choosing all over them. We put them up on the other wall after we made them, and I like them so much on the wall that I knew I wanted them as part of our school display area. Nathan loves them and points to them all the time saying, "Nuh-buh, nuh-buh!" and even Benjamin spends ages staring at them from my arms or his bouncy chair and cooing at them fondly! ;) Here's a clearer photo of them, and another close up:
Then we have the new bookshelf that I bought for the boys' books. This isn't strictly a school item, since all the school books are kept in the locked school cabinet (which I can't wait to show you with photos, but I haven't taken any yet!). But the only wall space left was next to the school table, and it fits in nicely anyway. The little boys have books to read from there for school, but they all access it all day long as well, obviously. I love that it sits almost flat to the wall, and looks nice, and displays their books front-facing for them to see easily. They love tidying their books away now too, which is an added bonus! ;) Yes, that is crayon on either side of the bookshelf. *sigh* The black crayon between the table and the bookshelf is Nathan's "school work" from this past week. Needless to say, I put him in a different seat after that!
Here's my smallest pupil! ;) He's working on connecting neural pathways and growing big and strong, as you can see. Pretty complicated and important for his first week at school! ;)
Okay, photos of actual school taking place!! Wheee, I'm so excited to be homeschooling my little ones!!!!! :) Here is a photo of Arthur and Matthew right after we sat down at the table on Monday morning for our first ever real school session! They were soooo excited! See Arthur's hands - I read on
Jill's homeschooling blog about how she has her children show that they are ready to learn by folding their hands in front of them at the table, and suggested it to Arthur, who JUMPED at the idea! He loves it, and he's doing it in the photo here. This week he has sometimes sat there impatiently with his hands folded, saying, "Come on Mummy!" when I am still getting the little boys started with their activities as we start school!
Arthur at school: See the concrete under the table? Yeah, I can't wait to cover that up with something pretty! When we do school, I sit in the middle chair so that I have Matthew and Nathan separated from Arthur if they are doing drawing or colouring at the table (like it's set up in the photo - they had finished this activity when I took this photo), so that they don't distract Arthur too much, and so that I can access them as well if they need me, without disturbing Arthur by talking across him.
Arthur writing his letters at the end of his reading lesson:
Arthur doing maths: Matthew has taken to spending some of Arthur's reading and maths lessons standing quietly at Arthur's side, just looking over his shoulder with interest and taking in what he's doing. It doesn't seem to bother Arthur in the least. He loved the pre-school activities at first, and still does, but he's increasingly interested in doing "books" like Arthur, and even cried when he had sat down in Arthur's chair after Arthur finished his reading lesson, saying "My turn!" and I said I wasn't going to teach him to read just yet! I think I will re-assess at Christmas. He'll be three-and-a-half then, and that's the earliest the book recommends starting. The earliest I was considering it was after Christmas, but I had no plans to unless he was showing obvious signs of wanting to or being ready. I may start with him in the new year if he is still this eager. In the mean time I think I will work with him on the alphabet a bit, and holding his pencil correctly in readiness for letter formation.
Oops, got side-tracked! ;) So here is Arthur doing maths lessons. He is sorting coloured tiles at the end of one maths lesson, and actually the other photo is after we finished a different maths lesson. He constructed triangles and quadrilaterals with the tally sticks in that lesson, but he was working on a railway by this stage! ;) These are lessons from the Right Start Mathematics curriculum.
Matthew and Nathan do sometimes sit in their Active World Trays with activities in there, but I have found as the week went on (and during the practise week a bit too) that I don't need to be quite so strict about them sitting in their trays in order for us to do school without distraction. I have actually found it's better for all of us if I have a few different "centres" with different activities. I have a tray or two on the floor with different pre-school manipulative toys and activities in, like lacing numbers or counting bears, etc. I put books and car magazines (they love to leaf through looking at the cars!) on the arm of the sofa, so they can sit up there and read quietly if they want to. And usually we have huge sheets of sugar paper and crayons on the table for them to draw if they want to. This works pretty well at the moment. Matthew will obey me pretty well about staying in his tray when we do it that way, but Nathan screeches and hates having to stay in the tray, and it takes forever to keep on correcting him. If he's finished activities and causing distraction then I usually insist on him staying on his tray while we finish school, but that's the point where he usually decides he wants to go upstairs for a nap! ;) So I take him up, and it's much better for us (and him, he's usually tired by then!) if he's napping.
Here's Nathey in his tray (a split second before the escape-effort and screeching began for the millionth time that morning!) - he loves The Gingerbread Man! It's his favourite book at the moment. He has Monkey and Baggy (blankie), and a pillow in his tray too, in case he wants to snuggle or rest.
I have discovered he MUCH prefers sitting at the table like a big boy to do school! :) He pulls out his chair when I say it's time, and climbs in eagerly, saying, "Cool, cool!" ("school", that is!), and sits there beaming for a moment, before starting on, "Daw, daw!" (draw) patting the table with enthusiasm until I get the drawing supplies out! Sweetie pie :)
School for Matthew is mostly at the table now, until he gets bored and chooses either the tray activity or the magazines on the sofa. He sometimes comes back to the table activity after that, but school doesn't take long so that's all the time there usually is! Sometimes he just draws, or sometimes I get out a colouring book for him. Other times I photocopy a worksheet (we bought a basic portable photocopier which sits upstairs. It's really small and as basic as they come, but it does the job of reproducing a black and white page from a workbook, and I am so thankful to have it for school!) from a pre-school workbook, and he does that. They have little exercises like drawing a line from the bird to the worm, or drawing the missing tails on the mice, or joining the dots to write letters and numbers, etc. He colours in the pictures when he's finished. The photo of the little boys drawing was taken at the weekend, so not technically "school". But they do this for school too, so I'm posting it!
School is going great! Arthur's favourite lesson is maths. He started using the abacus on Friday and was so excited! Everything is really basic so far, nice and simple to start off with, and he is kind of impatient to learn "bigger" things, but enjoying the lessons all the same. The same with reading really. He is whizzing through the lessons with no problems. The only problems I have are related to him trying to go too fast, or getting impatient with the speed of the lesson. He reads the words the fast way before I can get him to sound them out slowly the first time. He is eager every day to see if he's learning a new sound today. Those come every other day so he's disappointed half the time! ;)
Bible study is going nicely. I love I get to teach them about God in a sort of sit-down environment every day. They learn about God in our usual daily stuff anyway, especially from discipline, and we are doing a memory verse that I recite to them many times throughout the day here and there. But I love reading them a thought-provoking lesson about God, and then discussing it with them, praying, reading the Bible to them, and singing praise to God with them. They don't sing with me because they don't know the words, but they listen and do actions if the songs have actions. The Bible lessons are short and sweet, and I love starting the school session with them each day. This week coming I am going to introduce the character building lessons. We did only "core school" (as I call it! It's what we'll fall back to any time we're pressed or ill or whatnot) for the first week (reading, writing, maths, Bible), and I plan to introduce the additional subjects gradually. Character building starts this week with "Attentiveness" as the first trait to study! :)
We do music appreciation every day right as our school session finishes. I play a CD of a different composer each day as we tidy and the boys start to play with cars and things. As it plays I talk to them about the composer (which I started after Arthur started bombarding me with questions about them - I read the information on the CD cover at the moment), and then throughout the CD playing, I occasionally stop to ask them what this part of the music makes them feel like, or what they think the composer was thinking of or seeing when he wrote that part. They are very descriptive with their answers, especially Arthur. He always has a description that I hadn't thought of, and is able to connect his emotions to music very easily. He's quite expressive about feelings when listening to music of any sort, but especially classical music. At the moment, music appreciation consists of classical and jazz, because I want to expose them to those types of music more than any others right now, but I will include other varieties of music at a later date. Arthur likes to learn about when the composer lived, how old he was when he died, where he lived in the world, and so on. On Wednesday our composer of the day was my daddy :) He has written a lot of classical and jazz pieces and recorded them at his little studio, so we have 9 or 10 CDs written and played by Grandy! The boys love that, and have enjoyed listening to his music this week. Arthur seems keen to have a long chat with Grandy about composing music - not "how to", but more an interest in how he does it, what he's thinking when he does it, and so on. He has asked me when he can start learning to play the piano since listening to Grandy play the piano on the CDs, which is a first. Until now, he has been asking repeatedly to play the electric guitar! ;) I am looking into Suzuki piano lessons for the older two, but we don't have anywhere for a piano to go. My dad has always said he wants to buy us a piano when it comes time for our children to learn, if they want to, because music is his life and his passion, and he wants to pass it on to his grandchildren in that way, which is LOVELY! :) His condition is that we need to have a place to put a piano where a child can play it in a private place without being disturbed, as he feels that is essential. I am still going to inquire about the Suzuki piano lessons just to get the info I need.
I have told Arthur about our Unit Studies - that they'll cover geography, history and science (and probably art, maths and reading too!), and that they will be things that he asks to learn about. He was ever so excited, and immediately requested a Stegosaurus unit study. He is suddenly very into dinosaurs lately, and the Stegosaurus is his favourite by far. So this weekend I have started researching and gathering stuff for the Stegosaurus unit study (he also wants a Stegosaurus birthday cake when he turns 5 next month - NEXT MONTH people!!!!), and I'm having fun doing it! Unit Studies will always include Matthew and possibly Nathan in parts too. They'll be fun and informal, and we'll do bits here and there outside of the usual school session, more on some days than others depending on availability and energy! We'll do stuff from baking Stegosaurus-shaped cookies and colouring pages from the internet, to Stegosaurus crafts (lots online if you google!) and learning facts about Stegosaurus. Now, I do not teach evolution folks. I am not an evolutionist, I am a Creationist, and I will be teaching Creation to my children. We will undoubtedly visit the Natural History Museum and so on, and the boys will learn what the world thinks about history and dinosaurs and the beginning of the universe and the Earth, but only in such a way as they know what they're up against. Already there have been plenty of opportunities to talk to them about this, even with things like a programme on CBeebies called Boogie Beebies, with the dinosaur dance episode (Arthur's favourite). No, they did not live 250 million years ago, nor die out 66 million years ago. The guy says that as they watch, and I add, "Um, no, they didn't" and explain what the Bible says to the boys. So, they know that much, but they'll learn more about it as we study these things in more depth.
If anybody is curious about what the Bible teaches about Creation, and how incredibly accurately it's backed up with evidence around the world (completely blowing the evolution theory apart, incidentally!), please check out
Answers in Genesis. I went there and searched on all the things I have been most skeptical about, and was blown away by what I found. I bought the set of Answers books for kids, and the set for adults too. I am SO excited by what I am reading, and best of all it has really rejuvenated my relationship with God. I am in constant awe of God all over again, with the evidence of His reality and His Creation right in front of my face. Awesome! :) They have a science curriculum for age 7+ that I am really interested in, when the time comes. Oh man, I wish we had a Creation Museum near us! Those look fantastic!
Anyway, that is the update about school for now! It's so late, and I must go to bed. I am glad to have found time to write about our first week and post photos! I'll be back to write more soon. I have more photos of non-schooly things too! :)
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