The {home}school room post {2012}

I write often of how our family of seven lives and homeschools in a small home.

And because of our small home, we’ve had many different homeschool areas.  We always seem to be on a quest to stretch our little home to give us a space that we can call our homeschool “room”.  Some of our past homeschool room posts are listed below.

• Our first homeschool room was our dining room.
• The living room corner is transformed into our homeschool area.
• Making a school area in the living room.
• A rearranged living room makes a new homeschool area for the older boys while the younger kids have a school nook.

 

 

This year, I decided to simply embrace that we are a family that homeschools throughout our home.

We start our mornings at our large table.  This is where we do some of our joint lessons though we sometimes end up in the adjacent living room for our shared readings and music lessons. 

After our joint lessons, the older boys head to their bedroom to complete their lessons.  I check in on them periodically to make sure that they are working.  One time when I checked in, I found our oldest helping his younger brother with a question.  That makes me {smile}. 

 

Littlest Man and I head to the living room with some books where we read, sing, and play.  Sometimes we head to the little table in the kitchen to have a little craft time. 

After a little preschool time, I meet with the girls for their individual teaching times.  As I work with the girls, we sometimes find ourselves at the table.  And sometimes we find ourselves on the living room floor or couch.

Throughout the day, we will find ourselves rotating amongst all of these spaces as we work together to learn. 

Our Homeschool Storage

Our homeschool materials are stored in various places.  The most often used books and student & teacher tools are stored in the homeschool area.

 reference materials, teaching manuals, student workboxes, and my file box are easily accessible in the homeschool area

A caddy holds my often used teacher tools and sits on the table during school time so that I can easily grab what I need.

  Teacher tools:  stapler, paper clips, pens, markers, scissors, eraser, sticky tack, timeline figures, a grading scale, index cards, and a note to jot down things to buy from the store

Another caddy sits on the table and holds crayons & markers for the kids.

We also use a shoe organizer on the back of a door to hold some of our materials.

 

The shelves in our hall hold books, paper, and learning activities.  In this area, we store school books that we don’t use as often or even books that we will need later in the year.  We also have a shelf of books for reading in our “library”.  {smile}  A small shelf is designated as the preschool shelf and holds activities for our Littlest Man as well as some manipulatives to be used by all.

And this concludes our homeschool room post for the 2012 – 2013 school year!  Of course, I’m known for moving things around a bit so please come back to see if I change up the homeschool room as we stretch our little house!  (However, this set up is working really well for us so far!)

Thank you for stopping by!

This post is linked to:

Views from a homeschool mom’s chair

The other day as I was teaching my oldest son, I was taking in the view from my seat.  On any given day, our homeschool looks a little like this:

~ A little learning and a little coffee ~

 

~ A little friendly competition in between lessons ~

{ and a blurry picture too…sorry!}

~ A little lot of awaiting laundry {sigh} ~

~ A little art ~

~ A little bit of the littles playing starfall.com~

(They look guilty, don’t they?  Maybe it’s that big cannister of candy they were chowing down on!)

Those were some little views from our homeschool. 

Happy Homeschooling in 2011! 

A tour of our schoolroom~

If you’ve seen my family blog, you might know that we live in a small house – a little more than 1100 square feet, to be exact.  Ok, so that wasn’t exactly an exact number but you get the picture.  :)

For the first four years of our home education experience, we homeschooled in our dining room.  It is a nice sized room and gave us ample space for our school.  During some of that time, we were in the process of looking for a new house and I was wishfully hoping that our new home would have an extra room that would serve as our school room.

  {Preschool Area}

Then, we found out that there would be cutbacks at David’s work and he would be losing his job.  Since he had been with this company for over 11 years, we were sure that a new job would probably mean a loss of income too.  At that time, we decided to stay here in our little home that has a very affordable mortgage.  However, it did mean that we also decided to give up our dining room, our school room, to serve as a bedroom.

 {Preschool Books for the week}

We started the search for a new area for our school.  We tried the kitchen and it was way too small.  That was much too stressful for this mom.  So we set up a little corner in our living room to serve as the new school room.  To see pictures of it and some of the solutions that we came up with for schooling in small spaces, you can click here to read some posts that I have written about homeschooling & living in our small home.

 

 {The Art Cart & Book Basket}

My goal for our homeschool this year has been to streamline & simplify everything as much as possible.  So I set out to figure out a way to reorganize our little house to include a school area or “school nook”.  I wanted the things that we use daily to be within arm’s reach without having to wander too far.  Chaos can ensue when mom has to walk away to search for needed books & supplies.  ;)

In order to create a school area, you can see that we moved the couch into the middle of the room.  It is in front of the fireplace but it is a faux fireplace.  Even though the fireplace is pretty it takes up some valuable wall space in our little home.  So the couch was moved in front of the it which opened up an area behind the couch. 

{The older boys’ learning area}

  The boys meet at the large school table for their work.  If they need a whiteboard for any reason, there are some close by.  The curtains also hold memory work and schedules held on by clips.

{My older daughter’s work area}

Flower Girl (2nd grade) has her own learning area.  Since she is younger and needs more visual aids, little posters hang from her white board to help her as needed.  I have found that her sitting here by herself this year has really helped her to focus and get her schoolwork done.  It’s hard to see in this picture but we keep boxes of manipulatives on these shelves too.

We also use the living area for school too.  We sit on the couch as we read our read aloud books. Also, the younger children do preschool activities in the living room except for playdough and art projects.  Last week I thought that I’d let them do a little playdough in the living room on the rug.  Well, let’s just say that it was not my best idea.

So far this school area is working very well for us.  The little ones do not come back into the school area much during school and that helps cut down on distractions.  There is also plenty of room for me to walk around and help as needed or sit and teach a lesson with a child. 

This is what my children think about our new school area: