Parents who choose to home school their children will soon realize that, unless you have a designated area set aside for school work, the entire home becomes the classroom. To avoid disorganized clutter and the paper trail of the day's lessons spread all over the lounge, it is sensible to restrict the schooling activities to one area in the house. Setting up a home classroom need not be expensive.
Keep the wall colors restricted to neutral or soothing tones. Green and orange are good colors for calm and creativity. Keep the bold primary colors for accessories such as tables and chairs. To cut costs on paint, you could purchase a cheap tint to add to a basic white paint. With younger children, it is advisable to invest in a durable, washable paint.
Don't rush out and purchase school furniture. Use what you already have in the home. As long as a table is the right height for your child it will serve the purpose of providing a decent work surface. If the surface is uneven, a large piece of plywood or thick cardboard as a writing tablet for your child to press on, will solve the problem.
Your child's desk chair should offer back support, and the height should be sufficient to enable her feet to rest squarely on the floor while she is working. Do however, provide one comfortable reading chair in the room for silent reading. A home classroom should simulate as closely as possible a regular school classroom; with a reading mat and play corner for younger children.
For storage purposes, one should make an old bookshelf or cupboard available. Cardboard shoe boxes covered in brightly colored gift wrap will suffice to store learning materials such as stationery, paints and paper. Remember to label all storage containers for ease of identification and access.
If you are going to use some of the many free internet resources for home schooling, you will need to purchase files to store your downloaded printed resources. These files too can be covered in bright gift wrap and color coded,according to subjects or learning areas. All files must be clearly labeled.
Keep your old coffee tins and plastic containers for the storage of stationery and so on. These tins and containers can also be covered in paper or painted to liven up the display of stationery on an open bookshelf in the home classroom. Remember that re-cycling forms a part of every curriculum and your child should see you putting this theory into practice. You can also keep Macaroni, bead, stone or bean "counters" in glass bottles on these shelves.
If you are able to provide a separate table for art work and crafting, this table should be covered in a durable plastic tablecloth to enable ease of cleaning. If you have only one work surface, simply lay out newsprint and plastic before commencing with any messy work such as painting or pasting.
It is always a good idea to provide notice boards for the home classroom. These can be used to display themes you are working on or to display your child's work. A cheap noticeboard or display board can be created by using a polystyrene sheet covered in bright fabric or paper. Alternatively, one could purchase a box of thick carpet tiles and glue these in place on the wall to serve as a display board. An even cheaper option is to place string onto nails and create a wash-line type noticeboard. Simply peg your child's work onto the tightly stretched strings to display his assignments or artwork.
It is not necessary to purchase posters for the home classroom. One can print alphabet sheets, number charts and much more from one of the many internet sites which offer free homeschooling resources for parents. Your child can simply color in or paint these posters for learning display purposes.
If the room you have used for your home classroom does not have adequate natural light, make sure that your child's work surface is well-lit by a desk lamp. There should be no reflection or glare thrown onto the computer screen, however.
No home school classroom is complete without an internet-enabled desktop or laptop. This will be your most expensive outlay, but also your most essential one. Purchase a printer which is cheap to run, with cartridges that are refillable. Make sure that the work surface is large enough to accommodate the computer and a space for written work for your child.
On a limited budget, you can have your home classroom set up over a weekend; ready to commence classes on Monday.
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