See our new schoolroom!

We have had an extremely busy week and I have had no time to blog. It's weird to go a whole week without posting! I have been working hard on a couple of MOPS projects, and we tried to rescue an injured bunny we found in our yard ~ it died after 3 days :-( because of course we found it on Friday afternoon and it didn't live long enough for us to take it to a bunny rehaber on Monday. But by far the biggest task of the last week was moving our primary school location from our kitchen down to the basement.

In reality, we school all over the house. But we have done most of our work for the last 8 years in the kitchen. I love schooling in the kitchen because it is the hub of our home. But we ran out of room to store all our school STUFF. We ended up with piles of books, papers, and projects all over the counters and floor. And that did not make mama happy.

We have been living in limbo for most of this last school year, not knowing where we'd be in September. Now that my husband has a job (yay!!) here we could finally make plans and an investment of time and energy into making our homeschool function more efficiently. And that meant moving to the basement. This is phase 1 of a long term plan. Next summer we hope to knock out a basement wall and increase the size of our schoolroom, but for now even though it is less than spacious, it is pure joy to have a place for everything and everything in its place! I confess that after getting the room organized I have spent a fair amount of time sitting on the couch soaking up the aura! Weird, I know. But I'm okay with that. :-)

All the children were quite excited about the "new" room. Little Man helped daddy screw in some shelves (2 narrow shelves and 4 supports = $14 total at IKEA). And see the bottom of the clock in the upper right corner? $1.99. That's my kind of clock!


This is the view from the foot of the basement stairs. Yes, that couch has a hide-a-bed. No, it is never going back upstairs as long as we live in this house! (according to my husband)


Our toy room used to occupy the entire finished side of the basement, and now it gets just a small space behind the couch (just enough room to sit on the floor and build with legos). So that's a downside.



Just past the far arm of the couch is this little corner. We use the tv for watching math and writing dvd's.


These are our non-Tapestry books, arranged by reading level. See the color coded dots on the edge of the top two shelves? The upper shelf contains books for my accomplished readers, the second shelf contains books for our emerging reader, and the third shelf down contains books for me to read outloud to all the children.

At the bottom of the bookcase is room for two of the children's "cubbies". We use the workbox system for our daily schoolwork, but they each need a place to put the little extras or things they just really want to keep. These fabric drawers were something we already had, in each child's assigned color, so we just moved them down to the schoolroom.


The other 3 children have their cubbies in this larger bookcase (red, light green, dark blue). This is an Expedit bookcase, also from IKEA, which we already had downstairs.


Here is the whole bookcase. This holds all of our Tapestry of Grace books. The top shelf is year 4 (the 1900's) which we are doing this year. Next shelf down is year 3, and so on.



This is an insert with 2 drawers that fits into one of the sections of the Expedit bookcase. Perfect for our paper and colored pencils/crayons!


Little Man's math activity today was counting and placing "seeds" (kidney beans) onto watermelon cards.


Here is the back wall of our schoolroom. This is the wall we hope to knock out next summer. We have about 9 feet behind it that is storage right now, plus about 3 feet of width under the stairs. The bookcase under the whiteboard is our old "school cubbie unit" that lived for years under our kitchen window. Each of the children had a cubbie for their work. Now it holds most of MY stuff ~ the books on top are either books we use frequently or reference books.

And here is the short little wall separating the room from the stairs. These are the shelves that Little Man helped with. The small red mailbox on the bottom shelf is still being used to deliver messages to the family. It has new life since getting a place of prominence that is easily reached by everyone! Underneath the shelves you can see one child's workboxes.

And here we are working so happily on math this morning! ;-)

It is not my "dream" schoolroom, but it is working very well for us and I am so very thankful to have it!! And my kitchen is now.... just a kitchen!

More on our first day of school later......