The homeschool kindergarten looks very, very different from the institutional kindergarten. At first glance the environment seems far poorer. For example, the environment is not gaily decorated with pumpkins in October, paper snowflakes in January, pastel eggs and construction-paper flowers in April.
But if you pause to think about it, a lot of the stuff in an "ordinary" kindergarten is artificial, put there to make up for the absence of the real thing. If my kids and I want to have a palpable sense of the change of seasons, we don’t cut out paper pumpkins. We go outside.
I remember the sturdy toy kitchen in my kindergarten classroom twenty-five years ago, with its wooden toaster that had a hidden spring in it to pop up two slices of wooden toast. I have no such toy kitchen in my homeschool classroom. However, my children have been known to make toast from time to time. They butter theirs, and jam it too, and eat it hot.
I have been thinking about the homeschool environment a great deal lately, because I have had a great opportunity land in my lap this year: we are to build a new house in the city. We always hoped we’d be able to build a house of our own design someday, but we never expected to have the chance to do it so early in our family’s life together. So when it came time to draw floorplans, we put in a "School Room." There it is on our final draft: SCHOOL ROOM, among the more normal labels like KITCHEN, LINEN CLOSET, and BATH #2. (We carefully arranged it so it might someday have a mythical resurrection as FORMAL DINING ROOM, just in time for resale.)
SCHOOL ROOM is adjacent to LIVING ROOM and separated from it by pocket doors. It has two tall cabinets that flank a south window, beneath which is a length of base cabinet, like in a kitchen. The west windows, three of them, look out on the street; I imagine that my children and I will watch the school buses go by. There will be a table and chairs. There will be a comfortable curl-up-and-read chair. Beyond that I have not imagined.
Will I hang schooly-things on the walls, like maps and alphabet strips? Frame the kids’ artwork? Oscar has a school desk (attached chair, hinged top) that I found abandoned by the side of the road and lugged home; will that go in there? Will we water plants on the countertop? Will we install racks for books? How will we spend our time in there? I don’t know, but it’s exciting.
It strikes me that in moving to a SCHOOL ROOM, we are changing, a little, the manifestation of our philosophy. If there is a SCHOOL ROOM, does that mean SCHOOL is something special that deserves a special ROOM to do it in? Maybe it’s better to have learning be a normal, everyday, every-minute-of-every-day part of family life. But then, eating is also a normal, everyday part of family life, and many homes have a DINING ROOM. The point of DINING ROOM is to create a pleasant atmosphere that is particularly well suited to dining; it’s not to make DINING into a different sort of activity (although if that is your goal, having a DINING ROOM ordered toward that goal will undoubtedly help).
So SCHOOL ROOM should be. It’s important for me to remember, as I furnish the place, that it’s above all part of my home, and the point is to create a pleasant atmosphere that is well-suited — not just to learning, reading, writing, studying — but to learning at home, reading at home, writing at home, studying at home.
That’s different from doing it in a school or office. What a lovely challenge!
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