A Glimpse Into Our Schoolroom

We were very fortunate to move into a home with a basement. I immediately started thinking about school and how I could use all of this space. It has been a long work in progress, but I finally have it done! My last step is spray paint the chairs for the kids to sit in. So here it is! I hope you enjoy. I will go into different things in future blog posts, today I will just give a quick overview.

 View coming down the stairs.

View from the other side of the room. 

 This shelf holds our seasonal bins, and sensory items. 

 Basket holds their lap books. White bins are for weekly toys. 

Book shelf will hold Charlie's tot trays. 

 Kids' desk and lap tables. 

 Shelf in the corner. 

 Puzzles, games, and misc. craft items. 

 Blue bins hold five weeks of lessons. (Post to come.) Clear bins hold other misc. items. 

 My desk. Holds my laminator, Cricut cutter and printer.

 Closer view of my desk. 

 Little art station. Their easel. Aprons hang on the stairs, and there is chalk, board markers and paper on the tote. 

 Calendar wall. 

 Calendar board. From 1+1+1+1=1

 We got this one from Oriental Trading. Yes, I know, July is over. :)

 All the cards for calendar board. 

 Wooden puzzles and books, books and more books. 

 Misc. craft items. 

And our small foam ABC mats.

 Big ABC mats. I bought them at two different places and thought they would link together, but they don't. 

 Just for fun, the other side of the room! Storage, laundry and work out area. :)

The chairs I'm going to clean and spray paint for the kids to use. 

I hope you enjoyed the little walk through. If you have any questions, or want to see a post about a specific thing, just let me know in the comments. :)

I'm joining The Not Back to School blog roll. Come and see other creative ideas. :)

Blog Hop 

Thrift Store Finds!

 I love a good bargain! Who doesn't right? I spent part of the afternoon looking around a local thrift store. I found some amazing items for our upcoming school year. Here is what I found and how much I paid for it.

Car Ramp
I paid $3.00 for this.
Easel
I paid $7.00
Hullabaloo
I paid $2.50
Play tent
I paid $5.00 and it cam with balls.
Balls


My grand total was $22.00! Not one of these items is less that $20.00 brand new! My kids love all their new toys, and I love that I got them for so cheap!

*The tent and balls are not exactly what I have, but are the closest I could find.

Comment below with some of your great thrifty finds!

Check out my guest post

Head on over and check out my guest post on Ultimate Guide to Mommy Survival! I talk about preparing meals for when Charlie was born.

Summer is comig to an end

Summer is slowly coming to a close! Summers in the Northwest are a lot different than summers in the Southwest. They are very short up here. We're getting busy, gearing up to start our new year of homeschool. I hope many people will join us on our journey. Stay tuned for posts on our new school room, set up, and routines.

Starting our first year of Preschool next week!

I don't even know who reads this anymore. I'm going to start blogging again, now that we are getting ready to kick off our school year. I will start by blogging for my benefit, and pray that as people stumble across it, that they will benefit from it to. I have been doing a lot of reading lately on some other blogs, about getting the year started off. I was a little discouraged when I didn't find a single blogger that was starting preschool with no older children in the house. I wanted to read how everything went with them, and try to implement into my system.

With no bigger children at home, my day looks VERY different. We still have a lot of playtime, and both my children still nap in the afternoon (which is how I have the time to sit here and type all of this out.) We still have diapers, and sippy cups, blankies, and pacifiers. they dont help with house cleaning, well other than making the constant mess for me to clean up. There are no long books being read, or extensive projects that are going on all the time. No legos to be swallowed, no free for all paper to be ripped up. There are meltdowns, and screams, and "I declare a park day" kind of days. So where do I begin?

We are going to take our first year very slowly. Sparkle was gifted a preschool workbook from her grandma. I plan on going through that with her throughout the year. She is also starting AWANA (Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed) at our church this week. There is a book that she has to work though with lots of scripture memorization. Along with those two things we are going to focus on number and letter recognition. Of course there will be art projects (we LOVE to do art in t his house.), and LOTS of PLAY. I beleive that children learn best through play. For example, yesterday we threw a big green ball back and forth, and every time she threw the ball I would have her say b-b-b-BALL, b-b-b-BOOK and so on. She now knows the sound that the letter "B" makes. :)

Since my kids are so small (3yr and 17m) we are only going to do school 3 days a week. I'm not sure which days we are going to do, we might change it up each week and do different days each time. I'm just not sure yet.

So, here we go! Official start day is next Tuesday! I hope you all enjoy the ride as we go through our first year of school. I will share here, the things that I find online that help me, and also share the things that didn't work quite the way I thought they would. I hope you all have as much fun as we will!

Pillow Pit

My kids tend to get a little antsy when they have a lot of energy and no where to get it out. A lot of times I will see this in the evening right before bed time. They want to run, or jump. They LOVE to wrestle with daddy in the evenings. I also know they need BIG play when they are leaning on the coffee table and swinging their little feet, or hanging between the coffee table and desk!

So the other night, I went and gathered all of our pillows, blankets and even the toddler mattress off the floor, and piled them all in the living room. They then get to jump off the couch into the big pile. This is HUGE treat, because it's the only time we let them stand on the couch.

They both slept really good that night!

Sensory Bottles

I thought I would write up a quick post about our sensory bottles. My kids LOVE them! (I kind of like to play with them too.) I just used small plastic Pepsi bottles with the labels removed. You can either glue the lids on or screw them on tightly. I chose not to glue. Below are the bottles that I made.

 Water and spikey balls. The balls sink when you flip the bottle over. 

 Rainbow rice "I Spy" I put several small items in with the rice. Sparkle loves to turn the bottle to find different things. 

 Green water and Oil. I could have used more oil and less water. But it still works just fine. 

 Water and soap. Shake to make bubbles or "snow"

 Beans and pipe cleaners. This one was simply for the noise factor. I just put the pipe cleaners in to give it some color. 

 Cut up straws. At first this one was really neat. I was just putting straws in to make a softer noise. After I did it I realized that if you shale the bottle up the straws stick to the side from static. *Note: after awhile this will stop happening."

 Hair gel and glass stones. 

Piper cleaners. I don't have the magnet yet, but this one uses a magnet on the outside, to make the pipe cleaners stick to the inside of the bottle. 

The possibilities are truly endless.  I also have some bigger ones filled with water and other random things. Ribbon, beads, pom poms, pipe cleaners, buttons. Those are fun b/c some things sink and some float. I made those ones with bigger bottles though, and they are a little heavy, so they don't get played with much.

Even though my kids play with them a lot, I just realized that I don't have any pictures. 

I hope this was helpful, for you to make your own. If you have some that you have that are different than mine, please leave a comment about them. :)