I Have a Classroom--And I Am OK With That

I know a lot of homeschoolers are very....

...anti-classroom.
...anti-school-at-home.
...anti anything that looks like formal education.

And when I read posts or articles by those kinds of homeschoolers, I start to doubt myself just a bit. And then I read that their children are (usually) in preschool and I relax.

I completely agree that you need to do nothing that looks like school when your kids are that little. Unless you want to! That's the beauty of homeschooling.

Sigh. I miss preschool. 

So I'm not writing this to make anyone doubt themselves. Or to make anyone feel badly. But I would just like to write a little bit in favor of those who do a little "school at home."

You have to understand, I taught public school for 11 years. I grew up in public school. So when we started homeschooling....I did this:

L to R:  Sweetheart's desk, my chair, and Little Bit's preschool desk. 

I'm sorry, OK? We didn't have a table! And I had no idea what I was doing! Well, that set-up lasted 2 weeks and then we ended up at the dining room table the rest of the year.

Apple Unit. Three year old Little Bit and 8 year old Sweetheart. (2nd grade)

Which was fine. But we had this perfectly good room at the front of our house where we COULD do school AND store all our school stuff. That was really the part that got to me about using the dining room table--I wanted everything in one place! I NEEDED everything in one place.

So I prayed for a table. And the Lord provided! Twenty dollars later, we were in business and our first school room was born.

And when we used that room those few years, Little Bit would play/do school-y stuff in the hallway by the front door. She didn't want to be in the living room "all by herself." And in Kindergarten when she did join us for school more formally, I found out our little school room was CROWDED!

Kindergarten. Took about an hour every day. 

So we moved. I switched the toy room and homeschool room. We are still in there and it works great for us right now. It has everything I have wanted in a homeschool room:

1. Room!
2. A table.
3. A place to keep all our school stuff.
4. Walls to hang up school stuff where we don't have to look at it in the main part of our house.
5. The ability to close the door and leave school behind on our weeks off--and weekends.

I have found that the older my children get, the more we really look like we are doing school work. There are more subjects. There is more work. They have more responsibility.

That's not to say we don't have fun. That's not to say we don't leave the "classroom". I'll be writing more about this.

But now you know how we came to have a classroom, which I'll be showing you around soon too. The "new and improved" version that is!
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Where do you do the main part of school? Don't you think so much depends on the floor plan of your house?