classroom design Archives - Cat Skinner Club

As promised, and long overdue, some photos of our homeschool classroom! You can see the ‘before’ photos at the bottom of this post from August. Thanks to all of the helping hands (Mamma S, Chacha, Nanna, and the girls) we’ve really got something special here!

Mamma S is the reigning queen of the chalkboard drawing. This is her first, Ayla’s Math Squirrels.

This is some of the bounty from our first nature walk in September, which happened in our own backyard!

Re-purposed baker’s racks from our Toronto kitchen provide open shelving, complete with Noah-friendly toys.

We started out with a communal table, but now thanks to Nana, each of the girls has their own proper desk and chair.

Lunch on our first day of school. We invited the nursery school to join us.

Our nature table for the month of September.

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:

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