Welcome to Day 3 of the Spring Spruce Up in our School Room!

In this post, I am going to show you our history nook/seasonal table and answer some questions you’ve asked me.

History Nook/Seasonal Table

Across from our loft is this lovely little area. Like our school room, this area is a work-in-progress. The cabinets underneath hold our board games and videos. See the big, blank walls there? I’ve measured and they are the perfect size to hold all four wall timelines that I hope to be able to purchase this summer.

On the top is our globe, a little tray that usually has some little flower, leaf, or seed found outside. Today, though it is sad and empty. The lantern is a cool housewarming gift that goes with our old world vibe here.

This basket holds crafts or projects from our history studies, or sometimes seasonal objects. We’ve been slacking on collecting seasonal items lately. Right now, our rag doll and corn husk doll are taking a rest here.

I’ve placed our Little House Books here since they are central to our studies this year. I hope to add more historical stuff as the years go by, in addition to our history crafts. Things that will spark a memory of fun places we’ve visited in our studies.

Table vs. Desks

When I asked on Facebook what questions you had about homeschool rooms, Lindsay said:

“Work space! Rec’s for tables vs. Individual desks. Trying to decide how to make it work better for next year.”

When we lived in our old house, we did school at our dining room table. When we moved, I really struggled with whether or not to buy desks. I liked us all at one table, but I also knew that separate work spaces would come in handy.

I found these desks at Ikea, for $20 each. They are super simple to move around, which we do often. It’s the best of both worlds: Separate spaces when we need it and we can group them together like a table when we want to work together, too.

We can also push them all up against one wall in a line and have the whole room open for sleepovers or parties.

Storing Workbook Pages

Lauren asked:

“If you have a child that does workbooks and you tear out the pages…what do you do with them? They are everywhere!”

When I taught preschool, our kids used Abeka workbooks, and I had fourteen four year olds with four or five workbooks each. The teachers met during the summer and we pulled every single workbook page for every single student for the entire year. We stacked the ready to use pages in cupboards and sent home a packet of completed work each week with the students. However, at that point, it was the parent’s problem what to do with the papers! I remember because my Coco was in pre-k that year and I kept. Every.Single. Page.

I’ve since learned to let go. I am not a big workbook person, so the only workbook pages I actually have are the second grade math ones, and our high school Spanish worksheets. I pulled all the pages at the beginning of the year and store them in the magazine files on my shelf. Other options would be to store them in a binder, or an in/out tray on a shelf.

After the sheets are complete, my seven year old files hers in her Math binder. Up until a couple of weeks ago, we had all her work in one binder, but she outgrew it so we separated the subjects. My high schooler files her Spanish sheets in a binder, too. At the end of the year, I make one file for each of them with several samples of each subject and toss the rest. If you have several children, you could store the worksheets by subject or grade. I like magazine files because they take up the least amount of room and are easy to access.

A couple of you asked about portfolios. Our state does not require portfolios, though I almost wish it did so I would be more motivated to make some. Here is a great post on assembling homeschool portfolios.

Where We Got Our Stuff

These are Ikea’s Expedit shelves. I stalked Craigslist for weeks and found 2 sets used for half of what they usually cost. They almost fit perfectly, but one of the shelves was blocking our light switch. We simply left a shelf out, and since I park my desk there I put my teacher supply box in the extra-large space.

The desks are also Ikea, the Vika Amon Tabletop and legs.

Our whiteboard, custom made by my husband to fit perfectly on our shelves, is held up by velcro.

Our magazine files and white boxes are also from Ikea.

Little red trash can? Ikea.

No, I am not a spokesperson for Ikea.

But maybe I should be.

I’m curious, do any of you have a seasonal table?

Subscribe to blog posts here by feed reader, or by email here.

Tomorrow, you’ll have the opportunity to link-up with a post about sprucing up some area of your home! The Link-Up will show on all of the participating blogs.

Be sure to check out all of the great ideas for sprucing up around your house:

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling

Welcome to Day 2 of the Spring Spruce Up in our School Room!

The photo above is one wall in our loft, and holds the majority of our supplies. This is not all of our school stuff, I have a craft cabinet and a history nook I’ll show you tomorrow. My goal in our new home is to keep room to grow, so I’m trying to not fill any room completely. The other side:

Our workboxes fit nicely in these shelves. I plan to get divider racks (the kind you use in a kitchen cupboard) but for now, they are sitting on each other just fine.

Above is the whiteboard my clever husband made me. It’s a large piece of plexiglass. He painted the back of the plexiglass white, so the front surface is actually clear, and whiteboard markers work perfectly on it. The best part is, it’s removeable. Behind it…

… is lots more storage. I don’t have much back here yet, which is in keeping with my “room to grow” goal.

The covered boxes hold teacher supplies, Dvd’s, Cd’s, Software, Workbox games, math blocks, etc.

Did you notice the hanging Mona Lisa in the top photo? Here is how I hung it:

I used a plastic page protector, so the print inside is easy to change as often as we change the subject of our picture study. The bulletin board strip is just sitting on the top of the shelf. I use a similar idea for hanging maps.

I like the look of books, but rows and rows of books feels too cluttered. By storing some of our unused books in the garage still, I am able to break up the shelves and leave some fairly open with just a couple supplies. It feels simpler to me, and clean.

If you look at the photo at the top of this post again, you can see in/out trays. I have one stack I use for sorting different kinds of notebook paper, and one for the kids to turn their work in when they need it graded. I am definitely not the only one in the house who likes her working space clear. My seven year old posted this sign in front of our turn-in paper tray one day when it got a little too messy for her to handle:

Well, then!

I have books organized right now by subject and time period. These are poetry and character books:

This shelf is books we’re using to supplement the Prairie Primer this year.

Here is this year’s Sonlight Literature selections

Since I’m saving the higher cores for my younger daughter, I labeled them. I’m pretty good friends with my labeler.

We each have our own cubby of sorts, that holds the books and notebooks we’re using on a daily basis, and one for our supply drawers.

I use our magazine flies for teacher guides and workbooks.

Simply turn them around to get what is inside.

Tomorrow, I’ll be showing you our History Nook, showing how we use our desks in different ways, and answering some questions that were posted on my Facebook Page. If you have any questions, leave them below and I’ll try to answer them!

Linking to Works for Me Wednesday

Subscribe to blog posts here by feed reader, or by email here.

Thursday, you’ll have the opportunity to link-up with a post about sprucing up some area of your home! The Link-Up will show on all of the participating blogs

Be sure to check out all of the great ideas for sprucing up around your house:

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling

When we found out we were moving last year, my seven year old daughter made a wish list for our new house. On the list were two things: Own Bedroom and School Room.

I have to admit, I was kind of hoping we were going to have enough room for a school room, too. We got our wish!

At our old house, we started out doing school in our second bedroom that we used as a playroom. The walls were bright pink and there was one window. It wasn’t very large and with the table and all our supplies in there, it felt pretty tight. More often than not, we would bring out books out to the living room/dining room/family room and do our work there, where we could spread out.

I finally gave up on the idea of using of using our playroom and put a whiteboard up in our living room. Which was our only living space, it doubled as a dining room. After a while, I put up workbox racks and we gave into the fact that we are a homeschool family and school stuff was always going to be part of our daily life.

We’ve been so blessed with our new school room. It isn’t too big and isn’t too small. It’s actually a loft, and has six good-sized windows surrounding it. We get tons of natural light during the day, and the space is open on two sides, one looking down over our family room. We don’t feel walled-in at all. In fact, I never hoped to have a loft, I’d hoped to have a separate room we could close the door on, but this is so, so much better. I love the openness we have now.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you more of our new school room, but first we’re going to talk about storage solutions for those of you who might not have a separate school room. When we were doing school in our only living space, I had two goals:
Easy access to our materials. (Aka, I’m lazy and if I have to look for it, it’s not happening.)

For our house to not look like a classroom. (Aka I get enough rude comments about homeschooling without having a classroom in my living room.)

Books, Books, and More Books

While I love the look of books, any homeschooler knows you can collect enough supplies and materials to get a classroom look within the first three months of starting. If you’re saving curriculum or supplies for younger kids to use later, that’s a double whammy. If you’re using Sonlight… Hello. Triple-whammy.

If, you are completely out of your mind and you buy three, 32 gallon bins full of Sonlight cores at a used sale, even though you know you have nowhere to store them, well then your name might be Angela. Here is how I coped:

Bookcases. Besides storing books, I used covered boxes for school supplies and magazine files for workbooks and teacher guides. Because our space was so small, and our books were so many, the clutter started to overwhelm me pretty fast. I longed for a bookcase with doors, but we never had the money to buy one back then, so I rearranged some other furniture and made do with what we had around the house.

Hutch. For a while, we had a hutch in our dining space. I cleared out the bottom cabinets and drawers of the hutch and put our school books and supplies. In the top of the hutch, where we had glass doors, I kept our china, so it still looked like a dining space. The books and supplies were behind closed doors and I could breathe a little easier. The problem was we grew out of our little hutch in no time.

Armoire. After we got rid of our hutch, I moved our entertainment armoire out of our bedroom and we stuffed all of our school supplies in there. While the armoire was lovely for storage, it was enormous and a bear to get around. Bringing that into our already-crowded living space made me feel like I was living in an episode of Sanford and Sons.

Finally, we moved back to one tall bookcase and one short bookcase, and I stuffed the rest of our books and curriculum around the house.

Sneaky Storage Around the House

Covered Boxes. These were in bookcase, under chairs, on the lower shelf of our sofa table, on top of cabinets, and anywhere else I could squeeze them.

Baskets. We had one basket for library books, and one with all of our Wii supplies in our living room. Wii isn’t technically school stuff, but we do use it for PE once in a while. At times, I had another basket with current literature and read-alouds in it, too.

Stacks. Books are beautiful, and when they aren’t all stuffed, row after row in a crammed shelf, I think they make pretty décor. I had a few of our current poetry books on our entry table, and sometimes I would stack our current literature books on our mantel.

Office Armoire. We had an office armoire in our kitchen and I put some of our school supplies in there. It was easy to remember they were there because I associated that space with office type things. So when I needed our three-hole punch or a stapler, I knew it was in the office armoire.

File Drawers in garage. I’ve shared before how I stored our extra reading books. I also used these large file drawers to store curriculum I was saving. For instance, when we were done with our ancient Egypt unit and needed to make room for American History books, the ancients went into the garage.

Under the bed boxes. Not just for sweaters! Coloring books, art projects, craft supplies, those large erasable mats I got at the dollar store, and more fit in these nice-sized flat boxes.

My closet. We actually had a pretty large walk-in closet at our old house and I stashed a couple Rubbermaid bins in there with scrapbooking supplies that we used for notebooking, lapbooks, and art.

Kids Closet. Extra space on high shelves held a bin with art projects I wanted to save.

File Cabinets. I created files for catalogs, associations, field trip ideas, workshop notes, and just about anything homeschool-related. This keeps my homeschool binder less cluttered and papers easier to find.

Keeping Track of It All: Now, Where Did I Put That?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll put all your renaissance time period books very carefully into an organized, pretty covered box, and put it on top of a cabinet. Two years later, when you’re looking for that book on Rembrandt for an art project, you’ll find yourself digging through seven thousand covered boxes all over your house before you give up and do splatter paint instead.

A few extra minutes in the beginning of your storage process will save you lots of time and sanity later. I got this idea from the Messies Manual, by the way.
1. Create a Word Document.
2. List your various points of storage and what you have in them.
3. Anytime you are looking for something and can’t remember where you stashed it, you can run a Search in your document and, presto, there it is.

For instance, if I was looking for our Old Testament craft books, I would search “Old Testament Craft book” and Word would highlight where I entered it:
Garage, 3rd file drawer:
Old Testament Crafts

Ah, there it is! With my Ancient Civilization stuff. I entered this one specifically because I knew my future self wouldn’t remember if it was with craft stuff or our Ancient Israel stuff.

Of course this isn’t necessary if you don’t have things all over the house, or if your memory isn’t as poor as mine. The key is knowing how your mind works. Mine is a little fuzzy when it comes to memory, so this system worked well for me.

A simple alternative, if you don’t have a ton of stuff, would be to write out a list and keep it in your homeschool notebook.

Coming tomorrow, I’ll share how we do things now that we do have a separate space, and some pictures of our new school room, too!

Do you have a separate school room in your house?

Be sure to check out all of the great ideas for sprucing up around your house:

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling