Schoolroom/Dining room

Back when we were looking at houses, I had a vision of a schoolroom/dining room/library....all the walls, or at least a couple of them, lined with built-in looking shelves. But then when we bought this house, I realized the judge's paneling in the dining room was going to make my plan impractical. Unless I wanted to rip out the judge's paneling. Which I do not.

So! New plan! We have a dining room/schoolroom and, on the opposite side of the foyer, in what is supposed to be the formal living room, we will have (after our planned Ikea trip) a library/music room. We're going to buy a bunch of Billy shelves and make them look beautiful, like this: http://www.centsationalgirl.com/2011/11/from-billys-to-built-ins/

Only I'm hoping to round the corner with ours, so there's room for MORE books. All the books! Also, the vintage ceramic skunk or squirrel or....??? that I bought at the thrift store. And some other pretty things. But mostly all the books! I think I also need a house blog. But that is for another day.

Right now, though, that room has our old shelves in it, and a piano, and books overflowing all over the place. But the schoolroom is starting to come together. It is mostly furnished. We painted a few days ago. I still need more stuff for the walls. And to get the giant pile of books on the buffet relocated into the new shelves when they are done. Those lamps are going to go live somewhere else, too. But here you go:

So there's our table and buffet--both housewarming gifts from my Mom, who has a shop that sells such things. Mostly we eat in the kitchen, but it's nice to have the dining room available when we have people over and need more space (the table has another leaf and two more chairs that we can add, and, once the leaf is in, we can pull in kitchen chairs and seat as many as 10 fairly comfortably, I think).

The buffet is very big and holds tons of stuff. On the sides, each kid has his own compartment for books that he uses most days. And then we keep current history books and stuff like markers and pencils and scissors on the shelves in the middle. I'm not taking a picture of the inside, because it's already messy. But that's the point! It can stay messy, because no one sees the inside! Yay! The paint color, which will eventually take over the whole front of the house and maybe the stairwell and upstairs hallway is Benjamin Moore's Nantucket Fog. I was a little obsessive about picking a paint color, and this one is still more blue and less gray than I really meant for it to be, but I'm still loving it so far.

Then, in the corner by the kitchen, we have this cabinet, which we call The Old Lady Cabinet, because Dave says it looks like something an old lady would have. But I think it is pretty:

and the inside of it:

I can show a picture of the inside of it, because I made it look pretty with baskets from Target. The baskets on top are library books and then various books/activities that, in theory, the kids will work on when they have some down time but it's still school time--like when I'm working with one kid and can't move on to the next thing yet. And the baskets have mostly math stuff and art supplies. The idea is supposed to be that Gus (mostly) can pull out one of those smaller baskets and work on math (pattern blocks, geoboards, etc) independently. In actually practice, usually he plays multiplication games or Stack the States on my iphone instead. Which makes all my neat little baskets seem like kind of a pretty waste of space. But we will see how things evolve.

So there you have it. I wanted a room that would be very functional as a schoolroom but still be able to pass as a regular old dining room (particularly since this room and the living room/future library are right at the front of the house--we no longer have a good extra room where we can hide away all the mess and kid stuff), and so far it's working well. We don't have lots of educational posters and kid art work on the walls, but my kids don't produce much artwork and they never really looked at the educational posters anyway. I would like to finally get my stuff together enough to do a timeline somewhere....but we might use the upstairs hallway for that.

Schedules and whatnot

Scheduling is always a challenge because I have 3 kids, and lots of stuff that we want to do outside of the house, and also lots of stuff to do INSIDE of the house. So much stuff!

This year we're trying out an innovatively.....vague schedule, and it's working pretty well so far. Mornings (when we're home) we do an hour of math in the mornings, first thing (we're supposed to Bible stories plus poetry before that, but it requires starting earlier than I seem to feel comfortable with. I think maybe I can drop the poetry and do that in the car instead, and fit in 10-15 minutes for the Bible. Will work on that. I can do it!) Kids are relatively independent with math this year, so the idea is that, if I'm not busy reading message boards and e-mail, I can get some cleaning done in between questions from kids.

Then we do 2 hours of language arts. This includes reading, grammar, and writing. So far how it mostly breaks down is that I do MCT stuff with Ari while Milo reads and Gus does Brain Pop or Grammaropolis or something or other. Then Ari and Gus go read while I do MCT and Writing with Ease with Milo. Then Ari goes to work on Writing with Skill and I let Milo either do Brain Pop or read non-school stuff (which, apparently, is always going to be Harry Potter) while Gus and I do Writing with Ease and, sometimes, KISS grammar. We finish up with going through The Arrow (Milo and Gus) or Boomerang (Ari), and then there is lunch!

After lunch break, we have time for homework for various outside classes plus music practice (piano for everyone, guitar for Milo, practicing songs from his play for Gus). And then we finish up with history.

This is a highly simplified version of things, since there's only one day a week when we're actually home long enough that we can do all of this straight through in this order. But the math/language arts block happens pretty frequently, which is what I care the most about, so....so far, so good.

Note: It has been pointed out to me that we no longer live in the house with the dogwoods and the creek, so we need a new school/blog name. After some discussion, Ari and I have agreed upon Boxy Colonial Academy. Because we live in a boxy colonial. Every house built in the 80's in this part of Georgia is a boxy colonial. Well, maybe not EVERY house. But we looked at a lot of boxy colonials. Anyway....new blog header and name change coming soon!

Long time no blog.....

Umm, hello. Last year got away from me somehow. I can blame the second half of the year on the fact that we listed and sold our old house and moved into a new one (!), but I have no excuse for pre-January. Now the blogger interface looks completely different, it's been so long!

To sum up, last year was good and eventful. The school part went well. All the extracurricular stuff went well. We were very busy all the time. Then we decided we weren't quite busy enough, so we spent a lot of time fixing up our house to sell and then moving. Then I got pregnant. Then Dave changed jobs (well, same job, new school). Also, we're fostering dogs now.

See? This is Cocoa, our first foster dog. She's supposed to be leaving to go to her new home on Monday, though.

 So NOW I feel like we have enough going on.

So! New year in a new house. The new house is much closer to friends and activities, so we spend a lot less time in the car, and this is lovely. Milo's guitar lesson today is less than 5 minutes away. For example.

I feel like we're cruising along so nicely (last year and this year) with academic stuff. I'm happy with pretty much everything we're using; the kids are mostly working hard and not complaining (and not complaining, particularly for Ari, means actively enjoying....even if he'd never admit it). I will probably need to break the what-we're-doing-these-days summary into a few posts so that it doesn't get out of control. Let's give this a try....part 1: curriculum and scheduling. part 2: the new schoolroom! part 3: all the out of the house stuff.

Part 1, then!

Ari:
Math: Jacob's algebra, along with some Brain Pop and Khan Academy. This is going so nicely. He started it last year, after AOPS Pre-algebra proved a bit too frustrating for us. He's doing really well with it, and Dave is spending time a few times a week checking his work and going over things with him. Despite our kind of scattered math year last year, he did really well on the Explore last spring, especially in math and English (brag alert! 93% percentile in math compared to 8th graders taking the test, and he was in 5th grade)...so I guess we're doing okay in spite of ourselves.

Language Arts: a lot of stuff. He's maybe 2/3 of the way through Writing With Skill. We started MCT's Voyage level last year, but didn't get too far with it, so most of that is left for this year. I bought some back issues of Bravewriter's Boomerang from Homeschool Buyer's Co-op, so we're going through that and doing some writing assignments for literature studies. We have The Creative Writer, which we'll try to get to from time to time. He's taking a King Arthur literature class elsewhere. And I have a big ol' reading list for him to work through in all his spare time.

Milo:
Math: Singapore 3B and Beast Academy 3, along with Brain Pop and apps to finally memorize the multiplication tables. Still moving along. Still slow going. I'm hoping Beast Academy will spice things up a bit, and give him more of a chance to show off his relatively good conceptual skills and give him a break from his relatively agonizingly slow computation skills.

Language Arts: MCT's Town Level, Writing With Ease (we're halfway through level 3, and then we'll move on to 4), a daily language practice workbook that his ITBS scores suggested would be a good idea, Bravewriter's The Arrow, and lots of books.

August:
Math: Singapore 2A and lots of games and Brain Pop. Poor Gus' education depends more heavily on Brain Pop than I would like this year....but he has developed a fascination with and love for exponents as a result (he refuses to use Brain Pop, Jr.), so I guess it's not a total waste.

Language Arts: Writing With Ease (halfway or so through level 1 right now). We're trying KISS grammar, too, since he wants MORE. I'm trying giving him the same books as Milo this year and having him follow along with The Arrow, too. We'll see how that goes. He's not really any slower at reading than Milo, but his endurance is not nearly as good, so I'm not sure he can keep up. But Milo will probably usually finish the month's Arrow book in less than 2 weeks, so Gus can just keep going for the rest of the month while Milo moves on.

And then....

History: We're doing Story of the World 3. Last year we mostly just did lots of reading; I'd like to keep up with the mapwork and questions from the activity guide and even the occasional project this year. We'll see how that goes.

We're reading Bible stories and working on poetry memorization, too. There is bunches more, but I think the rest of it farmed out.

Maybe FOUR parts! Because I'm tired now and would like to postpone the talk of how we schedule all of this stuff for another time.