The Family's Response and Toy Room Side Pictures

So after I completely revamped the school room, I let my family see the final product. :oD
James, Rachel and Matthew had seen it already, they were with me while I hung all the bulletin boards, no need to relive that afternoon...there were a few cuss words.
But Molly hadn't seen it, nor daddy. Emily is sleeping over at nana's so she will have to wait.
Anyways, everyone is now really excited about the homeschool adventure we are now embarking on. Even daddy. He even requested that I slot him in once a month to teach a lesson, of course it will be his own lesson and I'm hoping it isn't an "evolutionary, question your faith" type lesson. I love my husband to pieces but please God answer my prayers and open Jason's heart to you-it would make my life a tad bit easier. :o)

Molly was very impressed with the Schoolroom....I could tell she kinda wished she was a younger kid again. I not only organized the school room side, but I also sorted through and organized the toy side-including the barbies. All the toys have a nice, happy comfortable home now.  Woody would be proud.

The school room shares it's space with the children's toys. This is the toy room side. Sorry about the poor quality pictures. I have no idea what's going on with my camera. I know the pictures are quite blurry-I'm going to see if I can fix that...also taking pictures in front of the window was tough so just bare with me. :o)

On the left side of the play room is the play kitchen and big "house" toys. The tall drawer cabinet to the right of the kitchen holds all the play food/dishes.
The doll house is perched on another drawer cabinet, it holds all of the play pieces that go with the doll house.  The kids can lift the house off and place it on the mat or on one of the tables to play with.
The tall bookshelf keeps dolls/doll clothes in one bin, a couple of lego bins, a bin for trains and tracks and a bin for littlest pet shop toys. Eventually I want to replace that book shelf with more white IKEA shelving and bins. LOVE those. :o)
The basket on the very top keeps all of our curriculum from last year-I need to sort thru it, I have books that I need to return to our school.



This is the bookshelf on the right side. This is where all of the little people stuff is neatly organized. The children can easily put all the pieces back when they are done playing with it. The kids haven't played with the little people stuff forever-the pieces were all over the house, I was completely ready to pack it all up and sell it. Now they play with it everyday. I'm also going to incorporate it into our grade one community social studies unit.




My shining glory.......The Barbie Cabinet!
I bought this cabinet when I was VERY pregnant with Matthew, four years ago. It's main purpose was to corral the Barbie stuff. I had a very tough time putting the thing together. It came in a giant box with a thousand small pieces and a 100 page instruction booklet! Even after two days of wrestling with it-it still wasn't right. The drawers and doors were always falling off and falling apart.
So needless to say-it wasn't serving it's purpose.
Until last week! I conquered it. :o) I used lots of carpenters glue and even dusted off my cabinet making clamps. Success.



All of the Barbie's, accessories and furniture have their own place now.
The kids and I even went through ALL the barbie stuff-located every shoe, hat, chair and handbag. We searched the whole house. And then I repaired all and any Barbie pieces that were broken and tossed any pieces beyond repair.
Success. :o)

On top of the cabinet I keep all of the children's games. Safe out of reach. You need special permission to play with games from now on.


So now James wants to learn in depth all the Canadian Provinces. Last May/June we did a unit study on Nova Scotia, the kids LOVED it. So I think I'm going to ditch the Alberta Social Studies Curriculum and focus on learning Canada, completely and thoroughly.

Thanks for stopping by,
Nicole

Organizing....

The magnetic white board is for teaching. 

The pouches below my white board are from IKEA, I keep all of our flash cards in the pouches. Easy to see, grab and return.

The fish bowl is for our 100 day count. We haven't started the year yet so there aren't any fish in the bowl yet. :o)

The cabinet keeps several resources, including reading rods, and the LR cash register-I can't wait to use it! The kids are going to LOVE it!

This cabinets keeps most of my resources and learning tools.  I'm so excited to start using these items-almost all of them are still sealed, never used. Can you believe I only found out about the Canadian Home Education Resources store a few months ago?? Last year we hardly had any tools/manipulatives, or resources. In fact I wouldn't have even spent a third of my $750.00 fund had I not found CHER before the end of last year.  My friend Tracey was like you BETTER send that fund!  But now I am ready.  I have everything I need. 

Some School Room Pictures

Welcome to our humble learning place, our school room. It's the bonus room above our garage.

This room used to be shared by my two oldest daughters, until last year when we moved Molly downstairs in the basement (very hard to do-but not regretted for a minute), and Emily in the room next store. The girl's bedroom was beach themed-hence the beach mural. I decided to keep it, it's actually quite cheery, especially during the winter months.

The dinning room table and chair set in the far back corner is for my eight year old son, James and myself, and for all four of us when we need to work together. 

The rectangle table front left is for my 4 year old son, Matthew and the round white table is for my six year old daughter, Rachel.

The shelves with white, green and pink bins corral all of our school supplies; paper, books, crayons, markers, coloring books, paint supplies-you get the idea. :o)
Almost all of the bins are labeled-the kids helped me label the bins. The odd ones that are not labeled-need to be. 

The tall cabinet and the short white cabinet house all of our homeschool manipulatives and resources. The long short cabinet with white and green bins keep the children's current school work-more on that later. By accident, I set up a "workbox" type system. Next post I'll show you exactly the system I came up with for us this year. I'm really excited about it. I've worked really hard the last four months to come up with system that would work for us. 

Anyways, that's a peek into our little homeschool. :o)

Thanks for stopping by,

Nicole

2nd post....:o)

So I guess this blog is turning out to be more of a diary than anything else.

I've spent the later morning to later afternoon working in the school room, hanging bulletin boards and white erase boards. Things are looking good. I wish I was a kid again...problem is James comes into the room and says "so can I go back to normal school?"

Which brings me to the question...why am I doing this?

I could be getting ready for a great year with just Matthew and I.....coffee dates and play dates galore. Freedom and peace and quiet all rolled into one.

So I ask myself again...why am I doing this?

1. I want my children to have the best education possible.

2. I want to be in control of the education of my children.

3. I want to have more influence over my children than the children they spend 8-9 hours a day with at school.

4. I want to create and maintain a good relationship with my children.

5. I want my children to be independent, unique children eager and capable of learning as much as possible.

Those are good reasons to homeschool aren't they?

They are my reasons after all.

First Post!

Hello.

Well I started this blog a year ago...and this is my first post. :o)

I was kinda side tracked with my stamping/card making blog last year-it was my little piece of me. Well after a belly flop of of year I decided that I needed to make some changes in order to succeed at homeschooling this year.

One change was scaling down "my" stuff. I was spending too much time working on my CTMH business and design cards. Did I just say that out loud?

I think I started using the design card thing as a direct outlet to my frustration over the "in my eyes" impending failure of a homeschool year.

I'm not saying that I was making cards when I should have been teaching James-but I was making cards/blog surfing when I should have been 1. sleeping 2. doing research on HS.

I did a lot of research before I jumped into the homeschool thing. I prayed on it and did research on it for 1.5 years. I did a lot of research but the one thing I missed was the homeschool blogs. I guess I just figured what would be the point if a homeschool blog?

Well, I quickly learned that blogs serve as an information, collaboration.

Blogs are an excellent way to learn about any topic.

So here I am now.

Going into my second year of homeschooling.

This is what I have learned:

1. Connect with other Homeschooling families. Support is crucial. Reaffirmation essential.

I was about to give up, and send James back to school for grade three. It was May and I had completely given up-I was burnt out and tired of struggling. I felt like a complete failure.

My husband and son had agreed that James should go back to school. I was about to give in....when I posted on a local board. Wow the support was unbelievable. I even received a phone call from a now friend. She saved me, and my little homeschool. :o)

Everything changed after that. I remembered why I started homeschooling in the first place. And decided that failure why not an option.

2. Get Organized, and stay organized. It's crucial for children (especially ones that have been in the school system) that you get and keep organized. Make a schedule and stick to it. One thing that was eating me alive last year was the guilt that we were falling behind. And we were falling behind.

3. Get lots of resources. For James in particular, he has relational vocabulary issues. He may even have a mild learning disorder. So he needs to be shown LOTS of different ways to learn some concepts. Like learning to count to 100 last year took forever. It was so frustrating, for the both of us. If I had known last year about all the awesome manipulatives available, for every subject-we would have had way more fun and a lot less frustration learning/teaching new things.

So after stocking my classroom with almost $1300 worth of new curriculum, manipulatives, flash cards, posters etc. I feel way more confident that we are going to have a good year.

4. Activities. Schedule at least two-three afternoons with activities. The kids need to be around other children, and they need to be doing fun stuff. So I signed all the kids up for gymnastics, homeschool gym class. I'm also considering signing the kids up for a full day of workshops through our homeschool association. And we are signing up for EVERY "homeschool days" even we can! :o)

Anyways, I have overhauled our classroom, organized all of our supplies/resources and curriculum. I am fine tuning my 2010/2011 school year plan and schedule.

I just have to hang my magnetic board and cork board. Then I will post pictures, because I know every blog surfers likes to look a pictures.

Thanks for stopping by,

Nicole