I am so blessed to have a separate school room -with doors!- in this house, but the room is a little too small for our needs. It would be a great home office, but 8 people in there for several hours makes for close quarters. We use a wooden kitchen table I got at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store as our main workspace, and it barely fits in the room.
We also have a very large play space off the kitchen (we basically turned the “family room” into a play room exclusively). Our play room has lots of bookshelves – three 6′ tall ones along one wall, and 5 more smaller ones arranged in a configuration to make a couple of “rooms within rooms”. Most of our toys and activities are stored on open shelves, for easy access and so the kids can see what they have.
However, I removed most of our Montessori type works when I was very pregnant, because I could not keep up with it. Most of the shelves are bare. And I’m starting to think that making this large, open room that I can see from every spot on the ground floor might make a better school room.
I wouldn’t be able to close the doors on the school stuff, but then again, it’s a huge part of our everyday lives and it just makes sense to use the bigger space for something we all do as a family every day. Also, next year I’ll have 5 official students, K-4th grade, plus Miss C and Mr X who love to “do school” with us.
I’d make the current school room into a play room – and I could shut the doors on that!
I’m so excited. We’ll finally have a proper nature corner (my little Steve Irwins and Jeff Corwins need that!), space for preschool activities in the classroom instead of next door in the play room, and I can hopefully keep the bloodshed to a minimum while I prepare lunch, since the school room will now be in the open space attached to the kitchen.
What gets you excited about the new school year?
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I have always had a classroom made out of one of our bedrooms but this year I moved our classroom into our living room. Now the boys each have a open top school desk and the room is multipurpose and more crowded but I like it enough and until we refinish our basement it will have to do. When (if ever) we finish the basement, the main area will be a large school room and our extra room will be a playroom with a door. I love the idea of being able to shut the door on that room. The playroom will also have a family locker room on one end and that will be fabulous. Right now, there is no good spot to keep boots and coats and snowpants and all that jazz – it takes up space. We’ll have an area built just to hold all of that and keep it out of sight. Someday… lol
I think if you move your classroom into your main area you will like it. I do keep my bookshelves in the former classroom but all my teaching supplies (minus art stuff) are in the living room/classroom. I also see it more – it’s easy to not open the door and go get busy in a classroom sometimes – in the living room it’s a little harder to miss it.
Our schoolroom is just off the kitchen/family room It doubles as a playroom, but it isn’t very large.
In practice the children rarely actually work in there. Most of their ‘sit down’ table work is done at the dining room table after we’ve cleared away the breakfast things.
The school room is mostly used for storing all the books and materials and my own paperwork stuff is in there. The family computer is in their also, but usually the only time they are actually ‘working’ in the schoolroom is when they are doing something on that.
The children have a large plastic tray which has most of their daily homeschool work in it. They just carry the tray into the dining area when they are ready to begin and put it back on the shelf afterwards.
Keeping all the gubbins in a separate, but adjacent, room makes it easy to keep the dining room clear and fairly uncluttered ( mostly) and gives them space to spread out when they are doing their work.
When they set up their soldiers ( a daily game)they do it in the schoolroom. We use the stair gate to keep the baby away from mucking up the carefully planned battle strategies.
I would love to have just one more room downstairs, but this works pretty well for us at the moment.
Pardon spelling typos. Noisy children playing with soldiers in background v distracting!
Our dining room is our school room. It is also our eating area, so it has to be cleaned off for dinner. I’m changing our curriculum this year from Abeka to a mix of stuff. I’m looking forward to using the new stuff. I’m also going from two students to three, which will be a new challenge.
I am finding it more difficult to get excited about homeschool. This will be my 24th year. I have 4 students 14, 11, 9 and 6. I have tried in a small room in the basement – too crowded – in an open, unfinished area in basement – too noisy (near laundry) and in the dining room. Since I have no eat-in kitchen, this is where we eat as well. I don’t like it in the dining room because of the clutter, but I find that the basement feels like a dungeon – with no sunlight. I feel like I could use a nice big extra first floor room. But building is not an option. Hubby doesn’t want to move so I have to be grateful for what I have and try to cope as best as we can. This year I think we will try workboxes to try to maintain some of the clutter.