Colored Pencils-Target

2012-2013 Homeschool Space

It's always fun for me to see other people's homeschool spaces.  So I will show you ours for this year.
I'm a little behind on getting school rolling.  This year my excuse is that we were derailed by national news planning to come from New York to follow us for a day.  They wanted to do a story on Miles's milk allergy.  Not only was school derailed, but so was Miles's birthday, important business meetings, harvesting the rest of our apple tree,  Labor Day weekend, our budget, stamping work, the neighborhood garage sale, a neighborhood meeting, allergy appointments, and probably more than I can remember right now.  Boy does it feel good to have our life back!  :)
So anyways, here is our special place called "school".  It's in a small area of our basement...the room where I hold stamp classes.
The boys wanted to rearrange their desks and put them facing the wall.  It was actually a brilliant idea because it allowed me to give them little cubbies next to their desks.  I love cubbies.  
I put some important charts for them at eye-level:  their names, the alphabet in upper and lower cases, a number strip, a color strip, and a shapes strip.  And we still have our wire line for clipping their papers.
On their desks are tins with pencils, glue, and pencil sharpeners....and probably Legos they are hiding from each other.

Above the display of papers, I put up three pocket charts.  These were in the Target $1 section!  And I last saw them there on clearance for 30 cents.  :)  I am going to try them out for Graham's phonics this year.
The boys love having the little characters in our space too.  This year Graham is the owl and Miles is the raccoon.
The cubbies are ITSO cubes from Target that I had already in the house.  I just had to reorganize a few things (what?! me?!) to free them up for the boys.  
Then we put together some art caddies.  Miles got a set of 50 colored pencils and 50 markers.  So he has a large caddy from Target's dollar section (or shall I say "$2.50 section").  Graham got the 8-10 packs of markers and colored pencils so he has the smaller $1 caddy.  Graham gets overwhelmed by too many choices still.  ;)  The caddies have worked out wonderfully as they can tote them to the kitchen easily when we are in the mood to do school there instead.
Then they put their school workbooks in the caddies....much better than stuffing workbooks into the small desk space.
We still love our magnetic dry erase board.  The boys put our weather card on it for the day.  And above it I have the calendar sheets I made up.  Clothes pins clipped to the side designate the correct day, month, and season.  
Below the board are our Melissa and Doug placemat maps.  They are my favorite simple maps for little kids. 
Off to the corner, I moved in my Joann's organizer from the stamp room. On top are a couple garage sale metal crates for holding bulky craft projects.We also have our flag(s) and the bucket of dry erase markers. Off to the left side is our pocket chart calendar which I will show in a later post.
I displayed Target $1 placemats from last year to serve as visuals for continents and planets.  And the boys designated Mom as the frog this year.  I also love our Pledge of Allegiance poster from homeschoolcreations.com
This came out sideways.  Look out Blogger, hubs is about to move me to Wordpress!  This is how I am happily utilizing the 12" slots in the Joann's organizer.  Empty trays, trays of magnetic letters, rock collections, Math-U-See blocks, felt board.  LOVE!
In another spot in our area, I have a Sterilite cart.  This is going to house the boys completed papers that aren't in workbooks this year.  Last year they had a heck of a time with folders and binders.  I'm thinking a "throw it in" system might work better for 5 and 7-year-old boys. 
   I assigned a subject to each drawer wit read more..