Not Back to School Blog Hop: School Rooms

This week for Heart of the Matter Online's Not Back to School Blog Hop, the topic is School Rooms. Ahh... a personal favorite of mine!

If you were with me last year, you might remember how I transformed my basement into a huge homeschool area. All of that cleaning, decluttering, painting, organizing... yeah, that lasted, oh... about 6 weeks, maybe less. We ran into a snag that we thought (in the planning stages) that we could overcome, but it turned out that we couldn't.

Michael is blessed to work from home 3+ days a week, usually. His "office space" had been in the basement, and once I took that over for a homeschooling area, the plan was for him to work upstairs. Easy, right? Well, except for the fact that 80% of his day is spent on conference calls, and we still needed to come upstairs for snacks, lunches, pottying, naptimes, etc. When a man is trying to conduct official business on the phone, it doesn't bode well for a customer or, say, the vice president of the company, to have to endure "family noise" on the other end. The two just don't mix well!

Needless to say, we went back to the old way - Daddy working downstairs, Mama and boys doing school and other life upstairs. And as much as I liked prepping the basement as a designated school area, and liked the idea of having one main school space... the reality is, I actually really like schooling where we also do living. It makes "school" more like real-life living, you know?

So, now that we're back upstairs, I'll give you a run-through of the several different places that school takes place.

The first is the kitchen table:


This is where all written work, science experiments, and arts and crafts stuff takes place. Over in the corner is my arts and crafts supply drawers and whiteboard.

Along the floor you'll see each boy's "school box", where they keep their math, English, handwriting, etc. books, as well as pencils.


Then we have the couches. Our main living area is directly off our kitchen, and has enough seating space for everyone, so this is where all reading-type lessons take place that would include all of us, which would be Bible, History, Science, and general read-alouds.

This basket holds all the books we'll be needing for those subjects:


Our other living area has only one couch, so this is where I do preschool with the littles. It is not directly open to the kitchen, so it works great to do preschool in that room while the big kids are doing seat work at the table - less distraction that way. Next to the couch is the basket that holds our books that we'll be reading from that week.

Please refrain from noticing how stained the couch is. We've come to the realization that while there are children under the age of, say, 10, living at home, our furniture will never be showroom clean, and we're OK with that ;-)

Here is the one remnant of storage that we've moved back up from the basement:

It holds all of our Sonlight books, art paper, a few preschool activities, and math blocks. There are several more shelves containing homeschool "stuff" still in the basement, but this one bookshelf manages all I need for regular, day-to-day school. If I need something a little out-of-the-ordinary, I just trek downstairs and get it, its no big deal. And it leaves the upstairs much less cluttered!

There's our set up! To see other homeschool rooms, be sure to check out the Not Back to School Blog Hop!