Homeschooling is such a fluid undertaking. Unlike in a traditional classroom, where teachers repeat roughly the same lesson plans and teach the same skills year after year, homeschooling goalposts shift constantly as children develop and learn. Although some families maintain special “schoolrooms,” most of us don’t have the space in our homes for such a thing, and with the deeper understanding of our children’s learning styles that comes from the time we are able to spend with them, many families like mine would find that confining learning to a single room would be difficult.
Instead, our homes fill up with random collections of paper, art tools, science kits, memory tools, and of course books. Where others cover their walls with carefully chosen decor, ours are hidden behind bookshelves and child-made art. The household linens share space in the hall closet with school supplies.
The bookshelf situation will be a project for another day, but today our school closet got a makeover. With middle school approaching and STEAM taking over the house, the supplies needed to be updated and reorganized. Paper needs are hovering in a weird transition between construction paper and graph paper. Crayons and markers grudgingly yield space to colored pencils and paintbrushes. Coloring books were purged to make way for an entirely new category of supplies, a box full of microscope, chemistry, and magnets.
And yes, we count board games as school. Don’t you?
The Word Worker 