Spring Cleaning in our Learning Space
Friday, April 1, 2011 at 8:01AM Spring break was declared this week at our house. We have been working hard since August with not much of a break (even our vacation included a few school days). Why is it hard for me to just STOP school and leave the kids alone? Maybe because we have an attitude of learning these days that is difficult to just put up on a shelf. We have been reading this week, watching birds, and thinking about some fun unit studies for the spring. Tomorrow we will be going to a wonderful museum at Emory University in Atlanta that has a collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Last summer I blogged about our schoolroom. If you forgot, click here. I love having the space for storing all of our resources, but to be quite honest, we spent most of our time downstairs in the kitchen. Crates of materials piled up downstairs and upstairs sometimes got neglected. Over the past week we've been organizing everything upstairs and I purchased a new shelving unit to house MORE books. I've also cleaned out lots of books we don't need for our home school association book sale in a few weeks.
Now, instead of each child having their own work table in the schoolroom, we have one table (for when they actually need to sit and work on something in that room), and put a shelving unit in the other table's place. These shelves have chapter books, readers, reference books, and read alouds we haven't gotten to just yet. I can also add more units to this if I need to, and they snap together easily.
I have bins of books (by subject) that I can rotate and put on top of the shelves:
When it's free reading time, there's always plenty to choose from.
I also love our bulletin board, which has our markable world map and all of the poems we are memorizing.
The room also a sofa and an entertainment center - so it serves as an upstairs family room on occasion. I love having this space, but I also know that a lot of learning occurs out of this space, too. It still feels good, however, to be more organized!
Have you been organizing this spring?
Reader Comments (3)
We are the same way. We have a schoolroom upstairs, with desks, white board, maps, reading area, etc. But through the year we have found that we are NEVER there! We prefer to do school in the living room at the coffee table or in the kitchen. Then I don't take stuff back upstairs and it's all piled up down here. I think this summer I am going to reorganize. I'm going to close the schoolroom upstairs, except for one desk, the whiteboard and the map, for when we need them. Then I'm going to move our big shelf downstairs to our empty closet under the stairs. I'll store all our stuff there. We'll see how that work.
I love the cubbies and bins!
When our school room was upstairs we never used it. Several years ago we moved it right next to the kitchen. It is supposed to be a formal dining room, but we have never been formal dining room people. This location works much better for us.
I'm going to start homeschooling next year and I am so overwhelmed with how to organize and get everything how I want it to be. I love the bins!!