I Heart Fall

Fall is my absolute favorite season.  The weather here in Hotlanta is finally cooling down.  Today was Friday, which is always a little more laid back than the rest of the week.  We finished up the necessities and headed outside on the front porch.  We brought out a little kid's table from the basement, our Handbook of Nature Study, magnifying glass, oil pastels, nature notebooks, and of course the girls brought their dolls and stuffed animals.     

We gathered some leaves from trees in our yard to color, and are in the process of choosing which tree we are each going to watch throughout the seasons.  We keep getting distracted and haven't actually chosen one yet.  We found one leaf with an insect's shedded skin on it.  It was like a little white skeleton.  We are going to take it the Nature Exchange at our Nature Center.  The kids earn points when they bring in things like this, and they use the points to buy other stuff, like rocks, shells, or animal teeth.   

We did our coloring with oil pastels.  It's the first time we used them.  I think regular crayons would have worked better for coloring leaves, but they will be great for other drawings.  The color shows up really well.  This is a kids' set I got from Dick Blick.  

You can see the three trees right in front of our house.  Two are pines, and I think the other is a white or live oak.  While the girls went off and played, I sat and sketched my front yard.  I wanted to write out the names of each tree for future reference and include a picture of their leaves.  The girls saw me doing that in my own nature journal, and then wanted to come back and draw some more on their own.  I love that!  I love doing things in my nature journal, but I so easily get caught up in just doing things to prepare them to do an activity that I often don't take time to do it myself, even though I enjoy it.  I realized again today, though, that the best way to get my kids interested in nature study is to be interested in it myself.  And I am!  I will admit I'm a little intimidated because I grew up knowing so little about nature (hence not knowing what trees are in my front yard...).  I was outside all the time, though, and I loved it!  Now I get to share that love with them, and they get to learn while they are at it.


We used our field guide for trees to figure out which leaf went with each tree.  Evie traced her leaves and colored them.  Kylie just drew hers.  I laid a page on top of my leaf and shaded it.  As I said, I would suggest crayons for this in the future.

It was a fun day had by all.  One of those days I am really grateful we get to do this homeschool thing!

Our Schoolroom

Want to see our schoolroom?  Forewarning- I change it all the time :)  So it may not look like this next time you come and visit!

Here you can see where the alphabet is for Evie.  She loves looking at the pictures.  They are from My Father's World, and they are the best I have seen.  You can easily make your own, of course.
You can also see the table where we sit for school, and the lovely china cabinet where we store our books and supplies.  I love it because I can see the books.  It may look cluttery but if I don't see what we have I forget about it.  And last but not least, you can see our story chair.  Kylie likes to sit there when we listen to stories online.  If you can believe it, three of us squeeze into that chair quite often. :)

 Here is Evie's calendar.  She doesn't want to do it one day at a time, and insists we put all the numbers up for the whole month.  I'm rolling with it :)  And, we store some of our materials in this rack.

 Our lovely map.  We have the US one behind that.  I hope to teach these kiddos some geography because I did not grow up knowing any!  It's been fun to learn.

 This is a little chart we keep for The Burgess Animal Book.  We got the pictures from Lindafay's Shutterfly album here.

We get to see a lot of birds, squirrels and spiders as we look out these windows.  We also keep our art supplies here and some books that are staples.

Evie's "day of the week" and "weather" charts.  I got these from another blog that had these as free templates. I printed, laminated, and put velcro on.  I can't remember the website at the moment.

Our science bucket.  Field guides, binoculars, and magnifying glass for when we need them.

This board shows the our "per term" selections:  composer, hymn, artist, and folksong.  We get these selections from www.amblesideonline.org.

Here are the main books we are using this term.  We get all of this from Ambleside Online as well.

So there you go!  We don't do everything in this room.  Sometimes we need a change of scenery.  But this is our home base, and it helps a lot that it is on the main floor and next to the kitchen.  We tried two other rooms before we finally figured out this was the best one!  We don't have an official dining room anymore, but fortunately we didn't use it anyway.  :)