Making the 'school' fit into your 'house'

A fairly normal looking living room. The scene of (sporadically) organized chaos. Some people have whole rooms dedicated to school, others have houses with some school stuff thrown in. Now traditional preschool waldorf says you don't need more then your real house with your real stuff but... Well we are all parents in the 21st century and we all feel pressured to make with the 'offical'. So how do we fit our school into our houses without it taking over our space?



Workboxes. For me I use this plastic drawer thing from Krogers.



Inside I put the daily 'school' activities. I use one box per year of age for preschool years. This particular day I have a magnifying glass, workbooks, a craft project, and some grass hopper puppets with a verse.



We, as many homeschoolers do, have books that have books that have books. Our books are on several shelves throughout our house. They are in storage containers, they are on the sofa, they are under the sofa. They are shoved into the space between the bed and the wall. The bottom shelf though in the living room are 'resource' books for general use. I figured if I put them out in the living room the children would 'discover' them. (Recently actually this has happen as Loch has discovered there are pictures/info of dinosaurs in the encyclopedias.

A set of Encyclopedia Britannica from my childhood, a newer Usborne Encyclopedia, dictionaries, and a few 'stuff to do when you're bored' books.


The painting board and 'hows the weather?' board I got from Funshine Express Thought they would be perfect for visually saying what the letter, color, and number for the week is. As well as practicing observation of daily weather patterns.



Black board has a drawing for this weeks theme. I'm a little ashamed to post this one, last weeks was fabulous and much more waldorf-y but that one disappeared into Neverwhere. I promise to atone by doing a post about blackboard drawing later.


The world map lives over the toy bins. Really it should be lower as the kids actually can't see it by themselves but... well.. it fits there and the baby can't eat it. Map was free from
UNICF



Bullition board is over the dinning room table. Contents change weekly. Sometimes it's the theme for the week ,(here is Fire Saftly and hexagons) sometimes kids art.



Our nature table sits on the windowsill. It makes use of a very lovely space only about 3 inches wide so otherwise completely useless.