Homeschool Readiness

We're starting school next week.

The kids are not exactly pumped about this. Quite frankly, neither am I. I want summer to last another, oh, 15 years or so. But that's just me. I'm a summer addict.

Truthfully, I'm always excited to learn, and I learn as the kids do. We explore science and history together (this year we start with the Byzantine Empire and should make it through the Middle Ages). We also do group art projects for which I found a fun new book that explores 2 dimensional art media through a series of projects. Last year we explored drawing, paying attention to shape and line, paying attention to light and shadow. Now we'll have fun learning about art supplies and their uses--paint and crayons, pastels and papers, pencils and ink pens.

Monday I put our makeshift schoolroom together. We live in a very small house--only 1250 square feet. To give you some perspective: The house is so small there isn't room for a separate laundry room. The washer and dryer are in the bathroom; the bedrooms are so small there isn't enough room for both a queen sized bed and a dresser in the master bedroom. The dresser is in the family room with the TV on top of it. And it just so happens that the family room has to double as the schoolroom.

Now I'm a person who tends to like to shake things up once in a while. I want more than anything to do something different with the family room/schoolroom. I usually want this every year.

The last major change was purchasing some tables which made it possible to move the schoolroom into the larger family room. Before, we were using the kitchen for double duty, storing crates of school stuff under the kitchen benches and pulling out what we needed as we needed it. Ugh. We had to clean up school to make lunch, then get it all out again. On top of that some of our school supplies were getting damaged by kitchen spills.

So I made scale drawings of the family/school room and the furniture and spent hours arranging and rearranging--all to no avail. It's pretty much exactly the way we've had it for a couple of years now.

But I really needed something to be different.

In the end, all I could manage was turning one of the tables in a different direction, but it's a change.