A Peek Inside: Our Homeschool Room

It's the beginning of a new school year and I don't know about you, but I'm always curious about what other people are doing.  What curriculum are they using, what a day typically looks like, and even what their school spaces look like.  I know this varies from the dining room table, the living room couch, or a beautiful, dedicated space. 

While my space might not be beautiful, we do have a dedicated room for school.  I've found that if we don't have a space to go to, it is impossible to keep Green Bubbles attention on me.  Although, since our school room is also our playroom for the littles, it's still sometimes impossible to keep his attention and we end up at the dining room table!

Below is a picture of our space!  There's a baby gate at the top with a few steps down into the room.  The baby gate serves to purposes.  It keeps littles in so I can keep on eye on them, or out when I'm not ready to deal with cleaning up a toddler tornado mess.  It also serves to keep our dogs OUT of this room and to be totally honest, the latter reason is far more important to me.  For some reason, we have one dog who just likes to do her outside stuff in the kids spaces.  It drives me nuts so the baby gate stays up at all times and the kids bedroom doors stayed closed all the time.

On the left of the room we have my chair for cuddles and read alouds.  There's a small table near by where I'm able to stack Little Miss' themed books for the week so they are easy to grab during quieter moments, or when I'm in need of a quiet moment.  Along the wall is a timeline we used last year for Green Bubbles (American History).  He enjoyed putting things up on the timeline but I don't think he really learned anything from it. It has been re-purposed into an art line!  We also have our ABC poster from All About Reading up at eye level for the littles so they can point to the letters and interact with it.  We were able to get a circle time chart as well so that is up beside it.  We got this for free through our charter since another family ordered it and then dropped out and our Education Specialist thought we would like it.  There's a lot on here we don't use but I'm going to try to make some of it part of our day.  It includes the date, days of the week, letter of the day, and the number of the day.  Things we probably won't use are the colors, shapes, weather, and rhyming words. 

The middle of the room is our school 'table'.  Since my kids are younger we got a small table from IKEA.  It is covered in paint, dried glue and play dough, and stickers.  But it totally works for us.  I put disposable mats (the kind that go under baby high chairs) under the table to prevent most of the play dough and paint from hitting the carpet.  There's also even more toys, and in the back is where we keep all our games, puzzles, arts and crafts, paints, paper, and anything else we might need for school.

On the right of the room is the fire place that we never use.  I put a small bookcase infront of it that you can see is spilling over with books.  Above it is our white board which I sometimes use, and sometimes forget about.  I also have our House Rules right next to it and to the right of the board is our nature area.  Currently there's some feathers, a section of a large tree branch, and our bug identification sheet.

And a little further down on the right side of the room are our maps.  Last year we only had the US map out and went over different states that family lived in before talking about the areas we were learning about while studying US history.  This year I moved the state map up and added the World map since we are going to be covering ancient history all over the world.

And here's a picture of Green Bubbles wanting to show off his brand new to us ABC puzzle mat.  It's missing the letter U, but what more do you want for as cheap as we got it.   He's having a lot of fun exploring the letters on it and we use it when we sing the ABC song.  We also play different ABC games with it (e.g., go stand on the letter R!).

So here's our school/play room!  This is about as clean as it ever gets and there are definitely things I want to change about it but for now we're making it work for us.   Do you have a designated space for school in your house?



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