Portable School

It has been nearly a year since I last posted about our preschool homeschooling.  The main reason for that is due to our recent move (now not so recent) to MA.  Ten days after I last posted we received a job offer for a job in MA.  The following month was spent packing and preparing for an undetermined amount of time living in a hotel.

We ended up living in a hotel suite, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a great room (including a dining and kitchen area) for about 7 weeks.  Despite the limited space and unusual living circumstances we continued on with our home school preschool.  I thought I'd share in this post the alterations we made to our schooling in case it might help anyone else in a similar situation.

Our "Everything" Room

Calendar Time: 
Calendar time was transferred from a bulletin board to a regular yearly calendar.  The calendar turned out to be a great way to record how many days we had school and what we studied each day.

Calendar Time

Workboxes:
Due to limited space, instead of workboxes we used a small expandable file folder.  Each activity received its own file.  This actually worked very well.

Portable Workboxes

Organizing Curriculum:
Since we wouldn't have access to a printer or laminator while in the hotel, I prepared enough school activities to get us from October through the month of December.  I figured if we were still in a hotel at that point I could prepare materials over Christmas break.  Thankfully we moved into our new home the first week of December, but I was thankful to have as much prepared ahead of time as I did.  I organized all activities by letter in a crate file folder system.

School Files

Supplies:
Based on schedule and curriculum needs I assembled a box of additional school supplies to use while in the hotel.  A plastic bin with lid served this purpose.  Included in the box were: stamps, markers, crayons, glue, various manipulatives, some paints, and stickers.

School supplies

School Time:
We kept our schedule mostly the same as at home.  Except we had breakfast every morning with Daddy downstairs at the hotel.  After breakfast time we started school time.  We continued with Calendar Time, Bible Time, and Music.  Then we moved on to our activities.  Most days once we were done with school we were leave the hotel room for a little while.  We would either go shopping, find a playground, visit the library (since we couldn't check out books and our we brought a limited number of books with us to the hotel), and just in general get out and explore while the the cleaning ladies cleaned our room.

Big E doing school

So overall, our portable school was a success.  The consistency of being able to continue with school from our home in FL, to the hotel, to our new home in MA helped the children transition smoothly.  Had Big E been in a traditional preschool the transition could have been more difficult and upsetting to my creature of habit Big E.