Homeschool room in a small space

Living in a condo, we don't have a lot of room to dedicate solely to school. While my initial dreams were to convert our large upstairs office space into one of those fancy, bona fide "school rooms" you see all over Pinterest, I realized that I'm rarely upstairs during the day and almost all my duties as a homemaker involve my presence downstairs. The much wiser choice was, unfortunately, entirely to obvious:  use our living/dining area for all of our main learning activities. (The decision did not come without a big helping of disappointment on my part -- I wanted to sit my kids down and educate them in full Martha Stewart style, by golly!)

So instead we have a small child's table and chairs, bookcase and a few wall hangings in our dining room next to our kitchen table. It's not as glamorous as I had hoped, but it is functional, budget-conscious and, yes, the kids learn perfectly fine. ;)

On the far left we have our Morning Board where the kids begin each day. To the right of that my husband put up a white board where I can quickly and easily demonstrate a concept to the kids. (Or, you know, let them draw for a good half hour...)

I also use the white board to display the vowel cards I made for use with the reading program (The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading) I'm doing with my kindergartner. You can buy the cards but it's so much easier and cheaper to just DIY-it and come up with a reason to break out the laminating machine.

Below that I have a bulletin board for religious education and our address/phone number sheet. This is also where I display the 1-100 number chart.

This map (from Costco, of course) is one of my favorite parts of the whole set up. The kids are fascinated with it!

This neat little hutch and drawers holds most everything the kids use during the day. I store all the puzzles, coloring books, games, art supplies, reading tools, etc. here.

Finally, tucked away under our bar counter:

Free Printables

• 1-100 Number Chart - b&w | color

Homeschool Morning Board

The Morning Board is the first event of the day after breakfast in our homeschool and it is a big hit with both my kindergartner and preschooler. They love the routine and interactivity. As a parent and home educator I love how effectively it transitions the children between playing and settling down for learning.

Here is what I have set up right now.

The first thing you can see is that everything, and I mean everything, is laminated. If you have a homeschool, I urge you...invest in a laminator.  I snagged the Purple Cow laminator they sell at Costco for $19.99, which includes a generous supply of plastic sheets in three different sizes. It's a glorious machine. After I bought it I literally spent days laminating everything I could get my paws on. 

Suddenly, everything I have is reusable! It's a miracle.

After I laminated all the pages I taped them on to a white poster board I found at Target for around 99 cents.

The first thing we do each day is say our Morning Offering. This is a really simple but sweet prayer for children that I pieced together using various sources around the internet and in print.

Then we move on to the Virtue of the Day (printable found here). While I like the virtue cards, the definitions are too complicated for my little ones so I am working on making my own.

Following that we go over the Shape of the Day (download available here) and Telling Time. About half the time I'll set the clock and the kids will need to tell me what it is, then help write it. On other occasions I'll have them arrange the clock hands according to a time I tell them. 

Here we come to our Temperature Chart (printable available here) and Weather Graph. This is exciting because the kids get to break out the wet-erase Vis-A-Vis pens (they're much nicer on laminate plastic compared to  the dry-erase markers) and fill in the correct information for the day all on their own. :)

The Today Song is usually sung after our opening prayer, but we'll pretend it's next since that's how I took the pictures. ;) I got this fun idea from Delightful Learning. The tune is to the song Frère Jacques.

Lastly we work with our Money Chart. I applied velcro to several coins that I keep separately so that the kids can stick them to the velcro strips on the page. 

From here we'll look at a wooden Melissa & Doug calendar we have so that we can go over the month and date.

Next time I'll share photos of what the rest of our homeschool space looks like!

Free Printables

• Morning Offering - b&w
• Telling Time - b&w (I printed the clock face on neon orange printer paper; you will need a brad or button and a hole punch to assemble the clock hands to the clock face)
• Weather Graph - color | color #2
• Money Chart - b&w | color