Not Back-to-School Blog Hop 2011 - School Room Week

This week is the Not Back-to-School Blog Hop's "School Room" week at Heart of the Matter. We don't have " schoolroom" per se. We do school here, there and everywhere. So I thought I'd share some examples.

The basic "storage" of our stuff is pretty much the same as last year (but we're not using felts for anything right now so the girls don't get to tear the sofa apart each day). I have added a couple random baskets tucked into corners of the dining room and living room. One has the books we're currently using for history. Another has up-coming books for history (most are from the library but I wanted to keep the non-library books in one place so I can find them when we need them). Another has our Bible resources. We're reading the Bible and notebooking it this year, so I have a basket with a couple different illustrated Bible dictionaries and some other "reference" books. The girls often go to that basket and use the books to see how to draw things we've read about or to get more information about things.  The "people" part of our school room is abit more varied . . .

Lately alot of our school has been in the family room, where we can sit on the sofa . . . 

. . . or on the floor

For messier projects we move to the table.

We end up doing alot of "school" in the car too. Either on our way to fun field trips, or just using our time when running errands. The girls often bring reading, coloring, etc. to do in the car, and we also often listen to science and history stories on CD or mp3 while we drive. Especially if Little Bit is asleep. When she's awake she likes music right now, so we often listen to memory verse songs like Hide Them in Your Heart by Steve Green, and the ABC Bible Memory Verse Songs which helps us all to learn Bible verses without even trying.

This is my "car basket". Right now it has some cloth grocery bags in it hiding everything else, and a bag of library books behind it, but it carries all kinds of things. I put it on the passenger seat beside me and can put anything that needs to go back in the house into it. Then when we get home I can put those things away and then it sits on a bench in the entryway & anything that I need to remember to bring with me to the car (like those empty cloth grocery bags), I can toss in the basket and just grab that basket and go when it's time to go. So, while not just for "school" it's very useful for all the library books and any CDs I want us to listen to in the car or whatever.

And finally, we have lots of other "school rooms".  We have nature centers, and zoos, and museums and the woods behind our house and the pond and the creek and the yard and the garden . . . we truly do feel that the world is our classroom, and we love it!