Tammie's Homeschool Blog: Where Does Your Learning Take Place?

The Man is working tonight, so I have some free time on my hands. I was just checking out SpunkyHomeschool’s blog and saw this post Where Does Your Learning Take Place? I love to see/hear how others have their school “area” set up.

When we first started Homeschooling I had this attitude that while we may be homeschooling, it did not have to take over our lives. I had resisted Homeschooling for a couple of years…even rebelling against it. It was something “I would NEVER do!” A little voice (God) inside of me would whisper maybe I should…and I, quite frankly, would tell that little voice (God)…”uh, sorry…NOT interested.”

After a year of butting heads with Chaney’s first grade teacher (long story…but lets just say we disagreed on almost everything), I finally realized that I hated the idea of her going back to school *more than I hated the idea of homeschooling. So, after The Man picked himself off the floor, I convinced him that :

“No, I am not crazy”

“Yes, I believe I can follow through with this HUGE undertaking…even though I have never finished a cross stitch project…yes, I know how many I have *started”

I affirmed that…

“I do understand, that even though I won’t have to actually take her to a school…I will still need to get out of bed at a decent hour” O.K. we are working on that one.

Then I agreed that, if The Man did not think things were going the way he thought it should by Christmas, I would trot her back to school and sign her up for the second semester. Because, in his words…”How bad could you screw her up in one semester?”

I then proceeded to let the little voice know that, yes, I have given in…but I am not going to totally give in…because homeschooling will *not rule our lives. So, that first year, *everything homeschool related was hidden away. And boy, oh *BOY was homeschooling a chore! It was extremely hard to get into the “learning” mode. While I loved having Chaney home with me…and she loved being home, I do not think either one of us enjoyed school. It was more like…lets hurry up and get this over with, so we can go do what we really want to be doing.

The next year, Riley was starting Kindergarten…and that little voice (God) was nagging me again. It was telling me that Kindergarten was supposed to be fun. It also told me that I would be paying her therapy bills for YEARS if I ruined her first year of school (O.K. that one was probably *not God). So…I caved again! I put up the cutesy alphabet strips around the wall, I put up a poster of George Washington. I had all the colorful visuals…in. my. Dining. Room! Which was attached to my living room…we are talking base housing, Internet, there is not a lot of room! Homeschooling had taken over our lives! But we had a BLAST! We felt like we were doing school…all of a sudden, learning was no longer something we hurried through, so we could go outside to play. (Although, it was a bit disconcerting to have George and his false teeth looking down on us at dinner time.)

This year, the base moved us into a new house. This house has a living room/dining room similar to the old house (but smaller :/ ) however, it also has a family room off the kitchen! This is now our school room. I love it! It is the best of both worlds…the look of a school room…but we can leave when we are done. I hope that we can always have a separate school room…but if for some reason that is not possible, I will never balk at having homeschool in our lives again!

So, Internet, here are some pictures of our school room…that I love! I apologize for the quality of the pictures…they were taken with my camera phone. Sadly, I do not have a digital camera. After The Man spent *a lot of money on the camera of my dreams a few short years ago…he is not really cooperating when it comes to buying me my new camera of my dreams

GW looking down on us