Please share pictures of your homeschool room or area. I'd love to see your set-up. I've pretty much had a combo playroom and schoolroom from the beginning. Now with my youngest getting older the room has much less toys. I posted pictures of our room on my blog.
I don't have pictures, but I can describe it... nothing fancy. We have two bedrooms separated by a bathroom in one section of the house. Rather than giving the boys each their own room, we decided to give them one dorm-style room (bunk beds, two dressers, and two desks) with a school/office in the opposite room. The "school room" is actually my office. I have a large L-shaped desk, and they have a very small desk next to mine to put their piece of junk computer (it does just enough, but nothing more :lol: ). Most of the instruction happens in the school room. Most of the independent work happens at the desks in their bedroom. We have wall-to-wall bookcases in the rest of the school room and in the living room to hold all of our books (family, curriculum, reference, picture albums, music, etc.) We keep the odd ball stuff (craft supplies, musical instruments, etc.) in the school room closet. Our house is primarily one floor with a very large, single room upstairs (no bathroom or anything up there). Downstairs is always very adult and tidy. Upstairs is full of toys, posters, and mayhem. Our school room is very boring, being downstairs and all.
Sounds like a great set-up! Mostly a one-level sounds awesome. I'm constantly going up and down stairs. We have a narrow 3 level place (including the basement). Land here in the city is at a premium so a one-level is rare unless you are talking about an apartment. I don't really have my own desk in our school area. I found that I rarely used it. I do have a computer area on the next level. I use that area to work part-time.
Originally, I was going to use our big downstairs room (I guess you could call it a basement, but it's not undergroud... we live on a hill), but that worked for one day. It's so out of the way down there. So far, we've been doing our studies at the dinning room table for the most part. I keep our materials in a nearby cabinet.
We don't have a school room. We do group studies in the living room, and science experiments in the kitchen. Everything else is independent work. The boys do their math, foreign language, and typing on their dinosaur computer. All other work can be done anywhere in the living room or front room - where I can still keep them on task, but yet, they can do their reading or language arts work book lying on the floor, or on the couch or at the dining room table, or we just take some of our work to the park and they work for an hour or two, and then get to play. They are 12 & 14, but still like the park. I don't want to be confined to one room all day, and with a baby, that's impossible anyway.
Please keep in mind that we just moved and a)aren't completely unpacked yet, b)this is our office also, and c)the room is far from finished. But here's our shell. The brown desk is DH & I's. The blue/white desk is Elijah's (my oldest). There are 3 small desks for the other boys, though Quinten has nearly outgrown his. The table with a table cloth on it is an old train table we're using for games/crafting/whatever. There are wooden storage bins under it that are just randomly full of craft supplies. The larger cabinet is full of games. The narrow one is full of DH & I's text books. The two small chests of drawers are where the boys keep their school supplies.
Flexibility is a great thing! I tried homeschooling on the bottom level of a 3 level narrow house. My baby's changing table was on the top floor. I sure had a great workout on the stairs until I decided to move the changing table downstairs
I should be able to get some pics in a few weeks. DH has been working on finishing part of the basement. The area at the bottom of the stairs will be the TV area, and then at the far end of the room we will have bookshelves, etc. for homeschooling. So we will have couches nearby to sit on for reading. The toy room is just down the hall, so hopefully that will keep DD3 out of our hair a bit This last year we did school in the afternoon, while she napped, but this year will likely be different, especially with baby #4 coming.
Well, it has to stay organized because it's small The chairs came from Walmart, they are normally $49 but we found them marked down to $8 each, we got 4 of them!! 3 for the classroom and one for my office.
Right now all of my materials are on and inside our dining room hutch, all math and writing-type work happens in the dining room, and most other reading happens in the study (where the computer and tv is) or the living room.
I'm working on organizing our entire house right now, but in a couple of weeks I'll be blogging with pictures about our school areas. We don't have a dedicated room either. My oldest son has his own room and it's right off the dining room. In it is his school desk and school books and my shelf of other school books/resources. The manipulatives and art supplies are mostly on shelves in the dining room where I do the bulk of schooling the younger three. I have a small bookshelf in there that I keep my current manuals on one shelf and my 1st grader has a shelf with his school books. My two little ones have a set of stacking bins - they each have a bin with their school workbooks/binder in it and the third bin is coloring books - they LOVE to color. I've been working diligently to purge and mainstream things so once I have it done I'll get pics and blog and post a link here.
