Creating a Space for Learning – Part One

How, how, how can we be approaching the end of August? I am so not ready to begin our homeschooling! I’m only halfway through familiarizing myself with the curriculum, and our classroom doesn’t exist! Thank god we have the freedom and flexibility of keeping to our own schedule!

I wanted to share some of the inspiration I found for our classroom space, and some of my ‘before’ photos with you. Our room was originally intended as a formal dining room, but we’ve never used it as such because we have such a lovely space in our kitchen where we can eat and look out over the field and forest. The dining room is lovely with gorgeous hardwood and a working fireplace, I just think the color is a bit dark and dramatic for a classroom. I’m hoping with some of Mama S’s talent we can transform it to a very soft parchment color. She’s game for this even though it took her something like ten coats of paint to get it the current deep red many moons ago. Once it’s painted, I just have to hang our black boards, and get everything unpacked and put away.

The room currently has a bit of overflow from the move – some extra furniture that doesn’t belong in there, and some musical instruments and photos from before we moved in. The plan is to empty the room of all of the things that don’t belong, take down everything on the walls, prime and paint, and then install the blackboards and our map of Canada. We don’t have a free weekend from here until god knows when so I really don’t know how this will get done. Somehow we always find a way, so I’m trying to stave off panic.

There are three educational styles that I love; Waldorf, Montessori and Reggio. All three focus on the whole child, and try to foster a passion for learning instead of ‘teaching to test’. All three also have some common ideas about classroom spaces that really make intuitive sense to me; everything should have a place and everything should be easily accessible by the children, each room should be looked at from a child’s perspective and created with their needs in mind, children should have access to the best quality materials and art supplies you can afford, children should be surrounded with as many natural materials as possible. Here are some images of classrooms that I love:

classroominspiration6

classroominspiration5

classroominspiration3

classroominspiration4

classroominspiration2

classroominspiration1

And here are my ‘before’ shots of our own classroom:

photo 1

photo 2

photo 3

photo 4

Wish me luck!

Comments

comments

Follow:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

1 Comment

  1. Auntie G
    August 22, 2013 / 3:55 pm

    Looks like you have a challenge ahead of you but I know you will get it done,,,,can’t wait to see the after pictures.
    Just an FYI on the walls….I was watching a decorating show the other day and they mentioned something about a new wall paper that does not damage or mark up existing walls,,,,,they said people in apartments use it because when they move they have to put the walls back to original color,,,,might be something you could look into so not to have to get rid of the beautiful wall color that now exists.
    Best of luck,,,if I can help in anyway let me know..

    Auntie G