What does a homeschool look like?

I'm guessing there are a few homeschools out there with flip-top, carved-up desks and chalkboards and pull-down maps, but I'm also guessing they're the exception to the rule.

Homeschooling isn't about recreating an institutional school experience at home; it's about setting up a learning environment that works for your kiddo-schmiddos.

For us--at this point, anyway--"school" looks a lot like play. (Now, lest anyone think we're unschoolers, let me hasten to add that we're heading down the classical education path. More about which later.)

The thing is, K-S isn't quite five yet, so I'm giving her another few months to focus on the real work of childhood. You know. Catching roaches. Dressing up to host formal "frog meetings." Glitter-gluing the dog.

We do a ton of crafts. We garden. We cook. We read. (Mostly English but Spanish, too, since we're on the U.S.-Mexican border.) We take walks around the neighborhood. We go to the library, the zoo, the beach, the park, the children's museum. We play games and listen to music. We snorkel in the bathtub and work puzzles and go on playdates.

And, yeah, I admit I shoehorn as much "official learning" as I can into most of what we do together. ("Okay, we need three cups of flour, and this is a one-cup measure. How many times do we need to fill it up and dump it?") When we read about dung beetles being introduced from Africa to Australia, we hopped up and found Africa and Australia on the map. When we made paneer, we discussed the curdling process and Little Miss Muffet (and discovered that whey actually tastes pretty good).

But in general, things are still pretty laid back around here. I'm looking forward to getting a little more "official" at some point--she'll be needing a desk and a reading lamp and another bookshelf soon, and it might be worth rearranging our space at some point to carve out a dedicated study area--but until then, school looks a lot like home. And I'm loving it.