The obvious answer would be at home. But in reality, homeschooling happens everywhere. Most homeschoolers can honestly say that the world is their classroom.
But you have to have a control center! And that, obviously, is the home.
Like I said in my previous post, we spend one hour daily, Monday through Friday on what I call table work. The rest of our day is spent going places, playing games, reading or listening to stories and just living life. I'm reminded that in traditional cultures, this is mainly how children learn. They just live life along with their parents. They learn by watching and then doing. And as far as I can see, this is still a magnificent way to gain knowledge.
But in our modern times we have the privilege and opportunity to learn about things that may be beyond the scope of our experience. There are also things we need to learn just to function such as reading and writing. And so we do take some time to sit down and focus on these things. (This is my personal belief and I would not purport to represent all homeschoolers. There are so many styles of homeschooling and people adapt and change their approach many times based on life circumstance and the personality/learning style of the student.)
We have a relatively small house but it is quite comfortable, accommodating all of us easily. (Though I do not love the town we live in, I am falling more and more in love with this house as I work hard to make it a home.) Anyway, the only place we have a table large and high enough on which to do work is in the kitchen. The kitchen is the center of our home. Always busy, always stuff going on. So I've had to get creative about how to store things so that they are easily accessible to us when we're "doing school", i.e. sitting at the table doing sit-down work. I will have pictures soon but right now, I'll just explain.
I use the walls a lot. I have many hand-written charts on the walls and doors held with mounting putty or clear sealing tape depending on the surface. Our alphabet chart is on the fridge. I have the kids' magnetic calendar hanging on the wall next to our family planning calendar. I would love for it to be lower but Z2 would definitely make a big mess of it. I just take it off the wall and bring it to the table when we're ready to do calendar work.
On sentence strips on the top half of the back of the door, I've written out Z1's biographical information: address, phone number, country, name, etc . . . Our number chart is on the bottom half of the door.
To store our materials, I have a wide, clear 3-drawer cart. It holds a lot of stuff so I've removed the wheels to make it more stable. I don't move it around anyway. The top drawer has arts and crafts supplies: glue, crayons, markers, pipe cleaners, glitter, etc. The middle drawer is the math drawer: flash cards, parts of the Right Start curriculum, counting blocks, etc. The bottom drawer is for handwriting/reading/spelling. I guess I could call it the literacy drawer.
On the table, I have four black plastic magazine files. Here I store the books and notebooks that we use everyday. One file is for Z2: sticker books and stuff pertinent to his learning. The other 3 are for Z1: one for math, the other for literacy and the last for science/social studies.
I'm pretty pleased with the set-up. I am constantly thinking of ways to improve it. I wish there were some way to have their books in the kitchen with us but we really don't have any more space in there. But I'm thinking. Even if we can't have all their books, there might be a way to display a few that I'd like to really focus on for the week or month.
When I tell people thaI really enjoyed going to school as a child, they often express surprise that I would then want to homeschool. They don't understand that for me, school represented a proving ground, somewhere to show what I was worth--not knowing that I was priceless just because I am. I didn't think learning happened anywhere else but the classroom and I was hyper-focused on doing well there. I didn't realize until after I left school that there is so much more to education than what happens sitting at a desk at school. I'm thrilled to be able to give my kids a different experience. So while we do have a classroom of sorts set up in our house, I'm working hard so my children will understand.
Where do we homeschool? Wherever we happen to be.
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