Our Homeschool Adventure

Last winter when we decided to homeschool Annabell for her kindergarten year, I planned to keep things simple and do our work at the dining room table. But then I came to my senses. Our dining room table is the catch-all of our house. I knew that if I had to clear it off every morning, get out our schoolwork, and put everything away again in another room at the end of the day's lessons, we'd never get anything done.

Thus our decision to transform Annabell's bedroom into a classroom. She had been sleeping in Liam's room for months, but we were holding out on doing anything to her bedroom until we heard from Rwanda. If our baby is a girl, we were going to move Liam into the small bedroom and let Annabell and her sister share the big room. Is our baby is a boy, he would room with Liam, and Annabell would move back to her old room.

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. Deciding that it wouldn't hurt our kids to ALL share a bedroom, we found some bunk beds and rearranged Liam's large room so that it could also accommodate a crib when the time comes. Then we set to work assembling a classroom.

The kids were so excited when we finished. They wanted school to start right away! But we held off until yesterday. September 9 was the first day of the 2010-2011 school year in the McLennan household!

Here are some pics from our first day...

Starting off on the right foot... We began our day by praising God for creating our minds to learn new things, and for giving us an amazing world to explore. Then we recited the pledge of allegiance, followed by another prayer for our baby in Rwanda and our Rwandan Compassion child Kansime, who is also attending school.

Tim helped me make these tackboards for displaying the kids' artwork out of homosote and cute cloth I found at Walmart. The rain-gutter bookshelves are exclusively for library books, so we always know where they are - top shelf for Annabell and the bottom for Liam.

I made this laminated calendar and applied velcro pads to each day for noting special occasions and holidays.

Some of the special days/events we're anticipating this year.

My eager students. Let the games begin!

When Annabell's lessons are too advanced for Liam, he'll have the opportunity to play with some special new schooltime-only toys. This was his first experience with Legos. What did he build? Why, a train, of course. And a train station.

We'll also be keeping track of the weather each day. Whenever the chart fills up, we'll tally the sunny, cloudy, rainy, and snowy days and distribute coins for each. Sunny=pennies, cloudy=nickels, rainy=dimes, and snowy=quarters. This will come in handy with some counting and math lessons as well.

The hardest part of creating a classroom - organization! Annabell's alcove to the left contains all our homeschool materials. The now-doorless closet to the right is home to my craft supplies and games. SO nice to have them out of the basement and accessible again!

First library run. They couldn't wait to fill up their shelves!