Home-made School Cabinets (part 2)

Picture One: The inside of DD#1's cabinet (it actually looks a lot messier up close - two of the plastic drawers are open - the design definitely helps to keep the mess down though). This picture is without having her do any straightening - and she is our most organizationally challenged child.



Picture Two: The door of DD #3's cabinet. She's not yet six, but we thought it most efficient to make a bunch of cabinets at once - and she REALLY likes it. Can you tell we were covering up a knot-hole with the big red flower? :)

I will try to post my husband's plans for the cabinet soon.

contributed by Alicia from Wisconsin

Home-made School Cabinets (some woodworking skills required)

Well, I think I promised pictures months ago of the school cabinets we built for the four oldest this fall. We didn't have them completely done until several weeks into school - they were plain bookshelves the first week, then they we added doors (when we finished decorating them), then we added the plastic drawers and built-in dividers then we added the caster wheels. I really love these cabinets.

Desks never worked for us - my kids actually liked them, but they take up too much floor space, are really ugly and are dangerous because the toddlers love to climb up on them and stand on the desk part.

Anyway, these cabinets help each child have their own space and keep it organized (to some degree at least) and makes them very portable on the main floor of the house. It has really helped keep books, timeline binders, science binders (we're using Mary Daly's materials - but not as much as I'd like so far), etc. neat and organized. By the way, these cabinets were inspired in part by the Learning Styles Quiz we took from Mercy Academy which indicated that a number of our children needed some extra help with keeping their work area organized.

I'm particularly proud of my first decoupage job ever! Can you tell which cabinet belongs to our geography buff? I found the black and white pictures at Target - 4 for 25 cents on the clearance rack! I'm having a lot of trouble with the blogger photo tool (not meant to handle so many photos, I suppose), so I'll put the rest of the pics in a separate post.

Our Geography "Museum"

The only Montessori "learning center" type thing that has worked for us long term so far is a Geography "Museum" we set up on our dining room hutch (we've never owned any china anyway!). The lower part of the hutch is enclosed cabinets (with three hidden drawers) where we keep our mish mash of National Geographic Magazines, Encyclopedias and postcards (buildings, art, etc.)

The main shelf - eye level to most of the kids - has more books and a children's Encyclopedia set discarded from our local library (with a really cool set of elephant book ends) and a set of tiny tile drawers (made in India). There are nine drawers and we keep set of coins from different continents, Saint medals, rocks and other goodies in various drawers. These are very popular with the little ones. They are allowed to take out one drawer at a time and can't take it to the basement or upstairs. It's easy to spot when one gets left out since a whole drawer is missing.

We also have a miniature trunk (with an old-fashioned map motif) with more post card sets, special books of interest displayed on the plate racks and a top shelf with breakable goodies from different parts of the world (mostly gifts from family members who went on trips - an Irish crystal mug, a tea set from Taiwan, etc.) The top of the hutch is a great place for coffee table books that we look at only on occasion. I found a lot of the key pieces to our museum (the elephant book ends, the miniature trunk and the little tile drawers) in Target's "Market Bazaar" section (in fact, the clearance part of it). They really helped the whole thing come together.

My dream is to set up a Science "Museum" some day too. I think it helps to have cabinets on the lower part so the toddlers aren't pulling things out constantly and not to over-clutter (I store some things in rubbermaid tubs in the basement and rotate). My three year old can reach the little drawers, but my 18 month old can't. Not necessarily ideal for Montessori - but more ideal for our house. :) There are always big siblings around to help anyway.

contributed by Alicia from Wisconsin (8/3/05)

Geography Ideas

Continent Boxes: (ala Maria Montessori) - Here is a neat Montessori idea that is easily adapted to a Catholic homeschool environment. Use a clear plastic Rubbermaid tub (approximately shoe box size) for each continent. Find artifacts, coins, Saint cards, and photos of art and architecture from the appropriate continent to fill each box. We started with just a box for Europe. We really enjoyed our little "Treasure Hunt" to see what things we could find from Europe that we already had in our house. We were pretty successful...we found a handful of coins from Portugal (my husband visited Fatima with Fr. Fox in high school), postcards of Churches and other buildings in Fatima and Rome, several holy cards of European Saints, a small pewter statue of St. Patrick, pictures of some famous European Cathedrals (from an old calendar), a bit of sod from Ireland (my husband had requested this when his parents visited Ireland a few years ago), a beautiful old pillbox made in Italy, postcards of several famous paintings and statues from the Louvre in Paris and the Vatican Museums and...you get the idea. My 6 year old daughter really took to this idea. She's very careful about how she treats the pieces and must keep them altogether and put them away when she's finished. We both decided that it would be fun to get a simple map of Europe so that she could sort the artifacts into their appropriate countries. I think we'll try Asia next. See "Montessori Cultural Lessons" from Michael Olaf for more details (Alicia from WI)

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How about painless geography lessons?! Stealing the idea from another homeschool mother, I put a huge world map on top of my kitchen table. Then, I bought a sheet of HEAVY GAUGE clear plastic (at your local hardware store), and covered up the map. Tuck the ends up under your table with thick tape (to avoid the spills dripping down the plastic sides). Voila! The kids, mom, dad, and visitors will soon be pouring over the table, looking at the world map. For several weeks, we had a daily list of places to mark on the map (use small amounts of playdough or sticky tack). It became a race, with my three oldest, to find the twenty locations in the quickest time. One week, they tried to stump mom. Great fun, and educational (but don't tell the kids!) (Kathie from Canada )

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Create a Little Museum in Your Home: We recently turned our dining room hutch into a mini "museum" by collecting all of our geography books, travel guides, atlases, coins from various parts of the world, postcards (and other interesting things that the children can touch) and organizing them in an appealing and accessible way. One thing I put together is a stack of images of Our Lady from various parts of the world. Since we've been doing a lot of geography study as a family this quarter, we also picked up some inexpensive travel videos (at Sam's Club) and made up lists of the countries of the world (organized by continent) and their capitals for the children to memorize (we offered each of them an extra credit "prize" for accomplishing this). Taking a page out of the 1950 Cheaper by the Dozen movie, we posted these lists near the children's beds and in the bathroom. The children are really enthusiastic about this project and we're really enjoying studying this as a family. (Alicia from WI)

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Making more room for home-made maps and charts - There never seems to be enough wallspace for all of our homeschool needs - particularly since bookshelves and bunkbeds take up a great deal of what wall space we have. We came up with an idea that has worked well for us. We took a number of pieces of poster board (card-stock thickness rather than foam board), punched three holes along the tops of them, and put binder rings into the holes on either side. The middle hole is good for hanging this poster book up on a wall. All of this poster space gave us lots of room for our favorite geography projects (like drawing a map of each continent and labeling it with pictures of people, places, bookcovers, etc. related to each country) and we can flip it to the appropriate page and hang it up from there whenever we like. (Alicia from WI)

Grammar Ideas

Nouns: I was introducing my first-grade daughter to the concept of nouns (she already understood the concept of verbs) and the following idea seemed to do the trick. I explained that a noun is a word for a person, place or thing. I had her draw ten pictures whose names would be nouns. She proceeded to start drawing a town (thinking primarily of places at first I think). We talked a little as she went along and she added a person and a car. Finally I asked her the zinger question, "Is there anything you can draw which would not be a noun?" The light of understanding came over her as she realized that everything she had drawn - trees, grass, sky, etc. all fit under the category of noun. Ah, success! (Now don't forget that there are some nouns that can't be drawn - abstract nouns like 'truth', 'justice' and 'virtue'). (Alicia from WI)

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Sentences: This idea helped my first grader better understand what a sentence is, as well as give her a little practice in capitalization and punctuation. I wrote several sets of two simple sentences (appropriate to her reading level) with no capitalization or punctuation. For example: "the girl walked to the store she saw an apple". My daughter circled the letters which should be capitalized and filled in the appropriate punctuation. This of course requires a certain amount of explanation and supervision, but I think the exercise was very helpful in understanding the concept since she already had a logical sense of the structure from her basic experiences of language. (Alicia from WI)

High School Options

We began homeschooling because my mother, a former public high school teacher, gave us a set of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write books when my oldest daughter was 5. We hadn’t thought much about school at that point. We visited friends who homeschooled, and were impressed with their 7 year old daughter’s ability to read the Bible, even pronouncing all the Old Testament Hebrew names correctly. My wife was certified by the state to teach first through third grade, and we agreed in the beginning we would take homeschooling one year at a time, always evaluating at the end of each year whether to continue. When my oldest daughter turned 14, and high school loomed ahead, we took serious stock of what to do, knowing that our choice would affect our daughter’s future, and the ability to go to college. We prayed, worried, and agonized. We looked into all the private Christian schools in the area, examining curriculum, cost, and weighing the inconvenience of having to transport a child to school daily – we live out in the country on a mini-farm, seven miles from the nearest town. The curriculum at most of the Christian schools was not that different from the public school, and in many cases, was inferior.

The Christian schools cost about $5k per year on average, with the good ones costing $7,000 to $12,000, and being up to an hour’s drive away.

My wife is an excellent elementary school teacher, and handles with aplomb and patience the foibles and needs of teaching four children through the elementary and middle school years, with only the usual difficulties. But she isn’t able to teach high school math, chemistry, physics, and foreign language. It would be impossible with her work with the other children to stay even one lesson ahead in that many subjects. And I just don’t usually have time to teach more than one or two subjects regularly, due to the demands of my job. So what could we possibly do? I decided my daughter deserved the opportunity to help make the decision herself. She couldn’t make an informed decision without data, and never having been in a public school classroom, wouldn’t have the faintest idea what that was about. We arranged with the local high school for her to “shadow” another girl through her school day, and find out what going to public school would be like.

My daughter experienced first-hand the peer group nonsense that many teens go through, as the girl she was supposed to shadow ignored her and talked to her friends. The school requires all ninth graders to take a health class. As my daughter sat through this class, the teacher began explaining how homosexuality was a valid alternative lifestyle, and not a disease or in any way “bad”. It was all my daughter could do to keep from raising her hand and presenting the Biblical view of homosexuality, together with AIDS statistics. Needless to say, after her day at the school, we felt renewed purpose in finding a homeschool solution. We had tried A Beka Academy* when our second child was born, but found that the video school was set up as a classroom, with the usual busy work and disadvantages of a classroom. However, we just couldn’t find much else at the time, and so enrolled our daughter in Abeka video school for 9th grade.

It was an adjustment for her, with the work coming in higher volumes than she was used to. The highly structured approach was an adjustment for my wife as well – but it allowed my daughter to have daily instruction from a Christian perspective by qualified teachers, and to function more or less independently. We followed this with 10th grade, and then my daughter decided to attend community college for her last two years of high school. She just got her SAT scores back, and with these and two years at the community college, she’s quite likely to be accepted at a four year school, most likely Oregon State.

We’ve embarked on homeschooling our second daughter, Rebecca, through high school, this time using Bob Jones Homesat*, which affords some greater flexibility and a better math and science curriculum. There are so many choices available now for doing high school at home, secular and Christian. Many Universities, like University of Nebraska, University of Pennsylvania, Oregon State, and others are offering online classes for high schoolers, most fully accredited, and some offering full diploma programs. The number of Christian curriculums that go through high school has exploded.

In short, I offer encouragement to those whose children are about to enter high school – you CAN homeschool successfully, and it is not a barrier to entering college. (Michael from OR)

Note from the Webmaster: We welcome submissions from all homeschoolers and very much appreciate Michael's ideas and encouragement. I would like to caution, however, that A Beka and Bob Jones University Press both have some materials with bias against the Catholic Church. Bob Jones has an especially strong slant and has dozens of articles against Catholicism on its website. Further information on some of these issues can be found here: catholic.com)

Thoughts on College Transcripts for Homeschoolers

I have a daughter who is in college and majoring in Chemical Engineering and my other daughter is graduating next month from our homeschool. Both have been accepted into Honors programs at their colleges. In fact, my oldest was pursued aggressively by many colleges and was awarded an ROTC scholarship which she ended up turning down. I am not saying this to boast but, instead, am just qualifying myself before I put my '2-cents' in....LOL

The one thing that I discovered in the college application process is that universities no longer 'raise an eyebrow' to homeschoolers' transcripts. Homeschooled children have an excellent reputation in the college arena. We have sent both of our daughters to the local university (University of Colorado) their senior year of high school as a transition to college. Because we decided at the last minute to try and get our daughter into summer school (the summer before her senior year of high school) I threw together a transcript......taking courses from junior high.......putting down co-op courses..........satellite courses.........anything and everything on the transcript. I had put little numbers next to these courses with the intention of explaining the types of courses at the bottom of the transcript. In my haste, I hit enter one too many times and did not realize that the 'explanations' shifted down to the next page. The university accepted my daughter immediately but I received a telephone call from their Office of Admissions...........I was TERRIFIED to return the call. When I did so, I spoke to the Head of Admissions and he just wanted to find out what the footnote numbers were about. He JUST wanted to clarify that they were not transfer credits from the community college. We ended up having a long chat and he told me that they really are not concerned what a homeschooler puts on a transcript....they look only at the SAT/ACT scores and they also look to see if the student has taken college prep courses. He told me that the homeschoolers blow them away and he wished he knew what homeschoolers were teaching their kids! They did not care that my daughter was 16.

My oldest daughter has had so many similar conversations with professors who have told her that their top students are homeschooled. So......my two cents......don't sweat the transcript! A classical education will prepare them for college. We have found that the university courses (especially English) are EASY compared with what we, as homeschool parents, make them do at home.

contributed by Rebecca from Colorado