School Area Photos

It is School Room Week over on the Life With My 3 Boybarians Blog Hop. I'm participating, even though I don't technically qualify. We don't have a school "room", we have a school area in our dinning room/family room. First, here is an overview photo.
To the left of the shelves is the door to the garage, where the washing and dryer are, and the door to the right in the photo is the door to my daughters' bedroom. To the right of the All About Spelling magnet board is the sliding door to the backyard. Opposite everything here is the dinning room table and beyond it is the entrance to the kitchen. My laptop is there because we use Homeschool Tracker Plus right on the computer for our daily assignments. No printing and wasted ink and paper for us.

Now for a detailed close up of my school shelves. Click on this one to go to a larger version of it, as I wrote right on it what every thing is.Now, as to why we don't have a school room is simple. We've had them in the past and for the most part they don't work for us. I need schoolwork to take place within sight of the kitchen and within hearing of the laundry area. We have lived in well over 10 different houses, condos, duplexes, and apartments over the years, and some of the time we were able to have a dedicated school room. But guess what? The school stuff ended up in the living room and on the dinning room table every day because that is where I was and the kids needed to be near me. The little ones would not even play in the school room if I wasn't there, but would rather bring their toys or puzzles to where I was. That meant stuff strewn from one end of the house to the other. No, now that we are in our 8th year of homeschooling, I have found for us it works much, much better to have a dedicated school area right in the middle of our living areas. School, and puzzles and such, stay where they belong and I still get my stuff done too. It is the best arrangement for us.

We just moved into this house at the tall end of June, so we are still getting settled. There are some changes I would like to make in the short term and in the long term to our school area. First, we having wall files waiting for my husband to hang for us. They look like this to the left but deeper and I hope to hang 6 of them where the pencil sharpener is now and move the sharpener over to the right of the All About Spelling magnet board. Each of the 5 children and myself will have one. The littles will keep things like their crayons and Sunday School papers in them, while the biggers will keep things like their Math books, and I'll keep things like my pocket notebook in it. My pocket notebook, shown right, is what I use to hold a single week's worth of the Sonlight Instructor Guides and other stuff so I don't have to handle the big binders more than once a week.

I hope to get an alphabet chart for the blank wall above the table as my 1st grader is very visual and I think it would help him to see the entire alphabet in order. Also, I would love to have a single shelf along the top of the entire wall extending from the top shelf of the current shelf unit over to even above my daughters' bedroom door. Such a shelf will allow me to have all of my Sonlight books out of boxes. As it is currently I only have 3.5 Cores worth out (some of Core 5 plus all of Cores K, P4/5, and P3/4).

Lastly, some day I hope to have a beautiful wall unit for this wall. Maybe something like this. Although I'm not sure what I'll do for a school table then, but at this point this is pretty far down the list of furniture and improvements we want to do so I'm not worried about details yet.