Tuesday, August 25, 2009

See our new schoolroom!

We have had an extremely busy week and I have had no time to blog. It's weird to go a whole week without posting! I have been working hard on a couple of MOPS projects, and we tried to rescue an injured bunny we found in our yard ~ it died after 3 days :-( because of course we found it on Friday afternoon and it didn't live long enough for us to take it to a bunny rehaber on Monday. But by far the biggest task of the last week was moving our primary school location from our kitchen down to the basement.

In reality, we school all over the house. But we have done most of our work for the last 8 years in the kitchen. I love schooling in the kitchen because it is the hub of our home. But we ran out of room to store all our school STUFF. We ended up with piles of books, papers, and projects all over the counters and floor. And that did not make mama happy.

We have been living in limbo for most of this last school year, not knowing where we'd be in September. Now that my husband has a job (yay!!) here we could finally make plans and an investment of time and energy into making our homeschool function more efficiently. And that meant moving to the basement. This is phase 1 of a long term plan. Next summer we hope to knock out a basement wall and increase the size of our schoolroom, but for now even though it is less than spacious, it is pure joy to have a place for everything and everything in its place! I confess that after getting the room organized I have spent a fair amount of time sitting on the couch soaking up the aura! Weird, I know. But I'm okay with that. :-)

All the children were quite excited about the "new" room. Little Man helped daddy screw in some shelves (2 narrow shelves and 4 supports = $14 total at IKEA). And see the bottom of the clock in the upper right corner? $1.99. That's my kind of clock!


This is the view from the foot of the basement stairs. Yes, that couch has a hide-a-bed. No, it is never going back upstairs as long as we live in this house! (according to my husband)


Our toy room used to occupy the entire finished side of the basement, and now it gets just a small space behind the couch (just enough room to sit on the floor and build with legos). So that's a downside.



Just past the far arm of the couch is this little corner. We use the tv for watching math and writing dvd's.


These are our non-Tapestry books, arranged by reading level. See the color coded dots on the edge of the top two shelves? The upper shelf contains books for my accomplished readers, the second shelf contains books for our emerging reader, and the third shelf down contains books for me to read outloud to all the children.

At the bottom of the bookcase is room for two of the children's "cubbies". We use the workbox system for our daily schoolwork, but they each need a place to put the little extras or things they just really want to keep. These fabric drawers were something we already had, in each child's assigned color, so we just moved them down to the schoolroom.


The other 3 children have their cubbies in this larger bookcase (red, light green, dark blue). This is an Expedit bookcase, also from IKEA, which we already had downstairs.


Here is the whole bookcase. This holds all of our Tapestry of Grace books. The top shelf is year 4 (the 1900's) which we are doing this year. Next shelf down is year 3, and so on.



This is an insert with 2 drawers that fits into one of the sections of the Expedit bookcase. Perfect for our paper and colored pencils/crayons!


Little Man's math activity today was counting and placing "seeds" (kidney beans) onto watermelon cards.


Here is the back wall of our schoolroom. This is the wall we hope to knock out next summer. We have about 9 feet behind it that is storage right now, plus about 3 feet of width under the stairs. The bookcase under the whiteboard is our old "school cubbie unit" that lived for years under our kitchen window. Each of the children had a cubbie for their work. Now it holds most of MY stuff ~ the books on top are either books we use frequently or reference books.

And here is the short little wall separating the room from the stairs. These are the shelves that Little Man helped with. The small red mailbox on the bottom shelf is still being used to deliver messages to the family. It has new life since getting a place of prominence that is easily reached by everyone! Underneath the shelves you can see one child's workboxes.

And here we are working so happily on math this morning! ;-)

It is not my "dream" schoolroom, but it is working very well for us and I am so very thankful to have it!! And my kitchen is now.... just a kitchen!

More on our first day of school later......

11 comments:

lahbluebonnet said...

Aaaaack! You started school? Oh that's right, I used to start school this time of year too. Since we just finished school a couple of weeks ago, we are still on break and waiting on books to arrive! I am still organizing our basement schoolroom too! This week I moved books and reloaded bookshelves for the umpteenth time!I am so glad you got your dream to start organizing this space. I also know how heavy that couch is! ;) My kids loved hearing about your dinner the other night!
Blessings,
Laurie

Lona said...

Oh, good for you! It looks wonderful. (And children can be a great help when they're motivated, can't they?)

Hugs to you...

Teacher/Mom said...

Looks great! Wish we had the space for something like that. Well, actually we could if we put two kids together in the same bedroom. But that would cause more problems than I'm willing to deal with. So glad things are working out for you all. Blessings.

votemom said...

i knew something big must be going on at your house this past week. congrats on a HUGE accomplishment!

do you have a dehumidifier that runs down there to keep all the books nice and dry?

Beth in Texas said...

What a great job. You are inspiring me onto more organization. :-)

Targetshopper: said...

Wow, what a lot of hard work you've done! It looks so good though and so clean and organized. I love all the bookshelves. Now I'm anxious to see pictures of the kitchen! :)

Leslie said...

What an awesome room! I can see why you are enjoying it. I think it's great that you have a couch in there too!

Enjoy!

Blessings
Leslie

Anonymous said...

My sister heart is SOOOOOOOOOO happy for your contented teacher-organizer heart!!!
Love you, sis :)

Whole Food Pioneer said...

I love all your pictures. We used to do school at the kitchen table and recently moved everything downstairs all into one room.

It's exciting to see it all together, and now you've motivated me to post my pics on my blog...tomorrow ;-)

Jennifer said...

looks great! What a blessing to have the extra space! Love the Ikea bookshelves.

BlessingintheBattle said...

Oh, Pam!! I love it! What a great space to school in!!

I agree with J, I want to see pics of the kitchen, too!