Today is Day 2 in my homeschool room open house. My heart is that as we walk through pieces of my room it will spark ideas, thoughts, and creativity for your homeschool space and day. Feel free to ask questions and of course please share ideas on how you do things in your homeschool room too! I would love to see your homeschool space, hear your ideas, and be sparked with new creativity because of you!
I don't know about you, but I do a lot of reading during my homeschool day. Whether its reading a book, history textbook, science textbook, or reading fun books it seems like a lot of my day is spent reading. I have found that busy hands make good listeners. Simple things like legos, crocheting, and making rubber band bracelets are all great ways to keep kids minds engaged while reading.
I rotate different activities for my children to do on different days of the week. Here is one bulletin board station you will see in my homeschool room:
I'll call this the "Mail Station". My kids love sending and receiving cards and pictures in the mail. The white mailbox in the picture above is from Target. As my children are working on coloring or drawing pictures and writing cards they leave them in this box. It helps me not accidentally throw away a coloring page left out that was a treasure my children were working on for an aunt or friend! (I don't like mess, if it's left out I throw it away! We needed a system for the papers everywhere and this was my solution!)
On the hook below the mailbox you see a ring with Christmas cards attached. I wrote a blog in great detail about my address ring for my kids (Click Here) to read more, but the cliff notes of that blog is that I stick the address on the back of the Christmas photo and then my kids can address their own envelopes, saving me so much time looking up addresses for my kids!
The cute picture of the mailman comes from my Grandma. She was a teacher and saved every bulletin board decoration she ever used. I was blessed to be able to inherit this box of decorations and I love them. These bulletin board pictures are old, some are so funny (I seriously need to do a blog post just on the funny pictures) and all of the president posters end at Nixon, but it's sweet and I love having a little bit of my Grandma's heritage in my homeschool room. You will see more of these posters in days ahead!
The board on the right in the photo is my "Dates 2 Remember" board. I add friends and families birthdays, anniversaries, or other special days we want to remember and I make sure that if there are dates in the month that need pictures and cards made we work ahead and get them in the mail early! Don't know if you have a "Dates 2 Remember" print out, but if you want one I made a FREE Printable that matches our 2014 -2015 Homeschool Planner. To get this Free Printable (Click Here)
Here is another favorite for my kids during reading time. These are simple step by step drawing pictures. I found those cute little paper holders at Michael's in the dollar bins and they are just perfect for the kids to practice drawing these simple pictures on. (white index cards on a ring would work great too) I love step by step drawing because it needs no explanation they can sit and do these while I'm reading and learn how to draw something new at the same time! Often I'll see these pictures they have learned to draw, re-drawn in birthday cards or in mail that is being sent out. It's a fun way to pass the time while I read! I keep these in a bucket on one of desks in the homeschool room
The last spot I'll show you is my file hanger. I won't get into all the details now, I'll just talk about the coloring page file for now. Both my Bible Curriculum, Answsers Bible Curriculum and our Science curriculum, Apologia have coloring pages that go with each week of lessons. I keep these coloring pages in the coloring pages file and one day in the week the kids will color these pages.
Stay tuned this week for more peeks into my homeschool room. Questions or comments feel free to email me jenny@growaustin.org
In His Grace,
Jenny
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