Homeschool Room

I was inspired by my sister's Thankful Thursday post and while I always have an abundance of things to be thankful for, I recently have been appreciating a few easy changes I made in our school room.  I wanted to share these with you here.

First of all, I cleaned it pretty thoroughly (as try to do a couple times a year).  It won't really be "perfectly" clean till we're done educating here and I find new homes for all the books and craft supplies, etc.  However, it is clean as in useful and usable.  It was also clean enough that Mom and Dad were able to stay there a couple nights on their most recent visit.

Yes, our school room doubles as our guest room.  Flexibility is important, right?

As part of that cleanup, C bought us a new, much-needed shelving/cabinet for the kids' individual school supplies.  Cubbies, if you will.  We were using a dresser, but over time, three of the drawers had broken and had to sit on the floor to be used ... which took up a lot of floor space and made the room really junky looking.

Secondly, when I set the table back up (and took the inflatable bed down), I turned it 90-degrees.  I found that when we had the table running down the middle of the room, which initially made the most sense for me, papers, crayons, scraps, etc. were constantly piling up on the back side of the table by the shelves because I didn't go over there as much and the kids aren't naturally inclined to picking things up along the way.  It was a source of constant frustration.

With the new orientation of the table, very little is out of my sight and the floor is staying a lot cleaner.  This is also useful since my baby-niece, E, joins us in the homeschool room almost daily.  Stuff on the floor is not good for her -- as it is, she wants to tear all the posters on the walls and pull books off shelves, but we're working on that.

Anyway, I thought I'd share with you a couple photos I took on different days over the past two weeks to show you how our school room looks on most days.  Usually a couple kids at the table, with various other kids scattered around in close proximity so I can keep an eye on them.  Somehow we manage to get everyone taught each day and have some fun doing it.

J and O do different levels of math, but J is certain that O is trying to copy her, so she uses the crayon/marker boxes as a divider between them while doing their work.  Funny girl.  That's Z using the closet as a reading nook back there.

Both these pictures show E way over there, most of the time, however, she likes to crawl around under the table, hurdling the legs of the chairs.  She's entertained for long periods of time making her laps.

I'll add that S usually does her school work in every room except this one (unless she needs the computer).  But that's one good thing about high school home school!  Flexibility.