Abandoning The "Schoolroom"

We visited a home a couple of weeks ago that had the MOST WONDERFUL schoolroom ever.

This family had taken their garage and turned it into a beautiful area for school.  The floors were tiled, and she had tables specially made that were high (her children are teenagers).   There was storage everywhere, with large windows overlooking their wooded yard.

I had schoolroom envy.

How I would LOVE to finish my basement and create a space dedicated for school.  There are, however, more pressing financial needs and I am thankful for the spaces we DO have in our home.

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Not Back to School Blog Hop - Our School Room

Last year at this time, I blogged about our new school room!  Unlike most things in my life, this area has remained virtually unchanged in the past year... it has worked quite well for us to have a room dedicated to our learning.   We are fortunate enough to have a bonus room which serves as the "stopping point" for all things school.   

Notice I say a "stopping point".   We do not officially "do school" in this room.   Most often we are downstairs at the kitchen or dining room table, or wherever our fancy strikes.    I found it really stifled our spirit to be sitting in one place all day.   This setup worked for about a week, and then we were ALL going nuts.


This is what our homeschool room is used for:

* a place to store all of our wonderful materials
* a place to display artwork, maps, etc...   

* a place where mom has her computer and printer and plans all of the lessons

* a quiet place if someone needs to get away to work on a project in peace/or has an art project that needs to stay spread out for a few days.

* a guest bedroom (we have a sleeper sofa in this room, too!)

*when dad works from home (which isn't all that often); it is his "office" -- the computer is here and he can close the door and work without hearing the rest of the house.

I dedicated a full closet to our supplies:  

This is the opposite side of the room... with a bookshelf for all of the teacher's resources, and also an entertainment center.   The room also doubles as a guest bedroom and the Wii is hidden behind those doors.    Those doors remain CLOSED during the week and only open on the Wii-kends!   We may use the television if we want to watch something on Netflix streaming, and we also have a DVD/VCR for watching educational movies.  

In the past year I have added a small system of shelving underneath one of the windows to hold our ever-growing library!   I have countless books in boxes in our attic, too, which I rotate through the shelves.   I love that these shelves are adjustable and can fit anything from our Magic Treehouse and Boxcar Children books, to larger reference books.   You can also configure them any way you would like.    

My favorite things are still the metal bins I purchased at Target to hold books current to specific subjects.  

The longer we homeschool, the more I realize that school takes place EVERYWHERE, not just in one room of the house.  It is an attitude and a lifestyle that certainly can't be contained to one room in your home.   

You can have school by the fireplace when it's cold outside: 

You can also enjoy a cool, Fall morning reading on the deck!

Or, you can birdwatch from the comfort of your family room!

  

This post is linked to the the Not Back to School Blog Hop!  It's School Room Week!

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Spring Cleaning in our Learning Space

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?