My "Schoolroom"

Hello Friends,
Someone in a yahoo group I belong to was asking for photos of our homeschool setup for a website she was making to help other homeschoolers. Of course now I can't find her post, so I thought I'd just put my pics here...maybe she'll find me, maybe not...but maybe someone truly is interested in my setup...then again maybe not.
But I'll post anyway. *Ü*

We are set up in my formal dining room...which we don't ever use as a dining room.
The pellet stove is in this room, so it's nice and warm.
This is a picture of the full "calendar wall". The next pictures are close ups of the different components:

You can see there are some "song sheets" and a white board which has days of the week, a clock, piggy bank and tally spot. Below that is a rolled up pocket chart, another white board (which is gray) used for morning messages, and a "weather station". To the left of the "weather station" is our calendar and thermometer.


The above close up shows the days of the week. We turn one card over each day, and will eventually use this to spring board into math computations...7-4=3, 7-3=4, 4+3=7, 3+4=7 etc. On the blue square we write the date in numerals. We do the "time" each day...right now we are doing strictly by the hour and so far have used word problems for this..."if it is 10 o'clock now, what time was in one hour ago" to get a time for the new day. We also tally the days of school each month and record that as well as count the days we've been in school (not for the month, but total) and then count that in coins.


The next photo is of our "white" board, that is actually gray...we use it for a morning message. Right now we are concentrating on punctuation, capitalization and spelling of sight words. The weather graph is done daily by ds4, the girls do it in their calendar notebook...well, most of these components are also done in their notebooks. Under that is our new Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow chart. Our old one just had the days of the week...I made this one yesterday to include days as well as numbers. I'll manipulate it for a couple weeks, then let the kids do it. Underneath, you can't see the clocks we use during the "time" part of calendar. Every child has his/her own clock. You can see them in the first picture I posted.

This next picture shows the coin songs we use, the Book-It chart and the pledge. Below that is a strip of seasons, the orange arrow points to our current season.


Last photo...it's our calendar, place value/school day counter pockets (we use popsicle sticks instead of straws for this), our thermometer {we practice counting by 5s daily, and this is graphed in our calendar notebook daily, and a hundreds board (we add then new number daily, we're counting our days of school...to 100, then we'll have a party!) Every day of school that ends in a zero (10th, 20th, 30th, etc.) we have a special celebration with "Zero the Hero" and do an art activity and a graphing activity.}


Well, that's not the entire room...I didn't post a picture of our table, so I'll have to do that on another post...but that is our calendar wall, and it takes about a half hour to do all of that. It sets a nice routine to our day.

The kids know we do calendar, spelling, Explode the Code or handwriting and math...then we have snack. Then we finish our school day with History and Science. Break for lunch and recess, then storytime and naps for the little ones. Lastly we have reading for the girls and some independent activities to reinforce math and language arts skills.

I've gotta run and make lunch...my tummy is growling!

Bye for now!
Blessings,
*Ü*
merchi