In our classroom...

I have used many items from around the house. It's helped keep the cost down, while making the room inviting & fun!

I have over the past year, or so, picked up some vintage planters. They are plentiful in the thrifts....quite inexpensive. I found these two for around $1 each.

Since I'm not a green thumb when it comes to house plants, I had them sitting in the girls rooms holding crayons & pencils & pens. I decided to clean them out, but still use them for pencils. There was just one problem...the pencils wouldn't stand up unless, the opening was stuffed full. I only want 6-8 pencils (nicely sharpened & easy to grab) for each girls. I had to wrack my brain....a pantry staple came to the rescue!

I filled the planter with the dried beans & the helped the pencils stay upright! Yay me!! Sometimes I amaze myself!

This cutie holds our colored pencils...

They work wonderfully, & the girl's have something cute to look at. Better than a pencil box? I think so!!

How about you? Have you taken an item & used it for a purpose other than what it was intended?!? Tell me about your repurposed item! I love to hear about great minds working!!!

A Report Card...

for the Teacher!!

The first week of our first year of Homeschooling is complete! We have actually finished a week and a day! Yay!!

My report card for the first week is B+...I taught what I studied, I taught on the sly fly, I taught with games, pictures and music!! I had a blast! I maybe had higher expectations of what the girls would do, or how they would react to certain things. All in all, I don't have one complaint about their performance, they were on board and on top of things!

L (my oldest) has said that she loves homeschooling and that she wants to homeschool forever!! Prob'ly not going to happen...I'm thinking that she will need to move out of the house at 18 or so!!

Li, loves the schooling, doesn't like not hanging with her friends on breaks...mom and older sis don't cut it when it comes to playing with the "cool kids"!!

Here's a quick look at our week with pics.....

Nature Study...wasn't really happy with my art abilities. Practice, practice!! 

Math is a lot more fun with games!! This memory game is matching the parts of the number 10....(1+9, 3+7, 5+5 etc.)

Home ec is being taught in the Frumpy House! L is learning how to read a recipe and made us pizza for dinner!

Reading "living" books is a major part of our schooling! Find the definition here.

Math...she used to dread it...now she doesn't even know she's doing addition and subtraction.

Always a lunch break...

Give a girl a chance to learn to read 30 words in one week and she thinks she can read a bunch of books!! Go Li!!

Another math game...matching dots. We are using an abacus so this is helpful in recognizing numbers quickly!

Learning about quadrilaterals! Yep, big word, easy concept!!

Writing down all the words that she has learned to read and spell.

     

The end of our first week! 

                                 

The beginning of our second week...late Sunday night means extra cups of coffee for the teacher!!!

                         

 I hope that some snippets of what we have done in the past week isn't boring to you! We had a very exciting week!! There were so many things, that I didn't even get to share with you!!!

Hope that your first week of school (wether homeschooling or sending your sweeties off to school) and that you are all looking forward to what you can learn this school year!!

                                    Today I'm linking up with another great blog Sophia's Ideas

Check her blog out here: