05/02/09 Our Homeschool System

I've sort of taken things from several different areas - what I like best from wherever I see it. I have an 'art' notebook and a 'song/poem' notebook that I regularly add to. His art notebook contains anything he's done that will fit into a notebook. He likes to look through it from time to time. I have no idea what I'm going to do when it gets too full to add stuff. Guess I'll start weeding it out with his help. That's a hard job. The song notebook is just random songs and poems that we like and will take down and read/sing for whatever amount of time. We have a copy of the library story time songs in it as well.

There are many other aspects of our 'system' that I haven't documented here - just thought I would give a quick rundown of what we are doing.

The tray area and music/cd "center":

Most of the current theme's work gets hung above the trays and books. We have another wall across the room that we hang random pictures/painting/etc. - or anything "off topic", also anything he decides he wants to hang over there.

This is his art-cart. It has a lot more in it since this picture was taken. All kinds of paper and material he can doodle, draw, design on. The top tray contains things that he's proven he can "handle" without supervision and can pull out and use any time he gets the notion (crayons, markers, glitter glue, erasers, stencils, stickers, stamps, etc.). The second tray contains things he needs supervision with or to use in 'larger' art projects. Most of the items here are items we glue on to other things (cut up tissue papers, yarn ends, feathers, googly-eyes, beads, beans, etc. etc.) and the third cart is sort of the catch-all right now - anything that doesn't really fit in the other two. This isn't all the art stuff, just the stuff we use most often.