Our School Room

We have had different layouts since we started homeschooling almost 5 years ago, but this year it has taken me much longer to organize our room. One reason, is that I have accumulated a lot more books. And another is the addition of more students. This year, Big A is in 6th grade and Middle A is starting Kindergarten! She's so excited to be starting school with us, but even more excited about her desk (and the pink supplies I bought her LOL)...

Anyways. The school room. That is what this post is about : ) I have been trying to organize it for the last few weeks and think I have come up with something that will work for a bit.


Here's what it looks like when you walk into our school room. I had to choose function over beauty with having 3 kids under 5 here. Eventually I will have my beautiful looking school room with wall to wall shelves, storage baskets, etc etc...but had to make do with the budget I had and must say I am pretty happy with the way it turned out! I also want to thank my friend Kelli for giving us these awesome desks!

I decided to go with a more traditional set up in here. Since we rent, I decided against painting the walls..well hubs convinced me not to since I will be the one repainting them when we move ;) So I just tried to get some color elsewhere. We have a Middle Ages-Reformation timeline hanging on the shelf as soon as you walk in, and a "growth chart" on the back of the door for measuring the kids on the first day.

 So the picture above is of our wall of shelves on the left side of the room. I painted the smaller two to match the larger one, but when it came to the one with the turtle tank, I was done LOL. I'll paint it sooner or later..just needed to get it done and put things away. The shelves each have a function for ease of finding things. The green and pink bins on the shelf hold things that I dont want the little ones to get to- things like preschool activity bags, playdoh, puzzles that are too small for them etc. I cant tell you the battle I have had trying to keep those things up and away..this was a perfect solution. We used to have our art supplies up there, but they were moved into the dining room hutch, since we do our art at the kitchen island. Like I said, I am all about function and convenience at this point ;)

Speaking of shelves...

This one holds all my teachers manuals, our Kindergarten curriculum,  future ACE PACES for both children, supplemental workbooks for Big A and Middle A, as well as some preschool materials for Little A. The top shelf holds any math manipulatives, bible supplies, and flash cards and things.

 This shelf is our shelf of science. We hold all our supplemental things for science here as well as some things for geography. Our turtle squirtle lives here also....um, speaking of which..I think Big A needs to clean his tank *blush*

This shelf holds all of Big A's books. The container on top holds some supplies like pencils, erasers, etc. Up and out of reach of little kids ;) I will be putting a small corkboard where the clip board is for Big A's GOAL cards and various things he needs soon.

 
This shelf holds the toys I dont want the baby to grab, a basket of coloring books, our little jewel books and the rest of our picture books.I had them in there all nice and neat, but of course, as I was redoing other things in there,  my children started pulling them down again. Its all good...putting them back in is now the 5 yr olds job...I'm not stressing about it ;)


Next is my teaching area.....

The little shelf is right below my white board and holds anything I need for our circle time, K curriculum like the large flashcards that I will be using often, and other various things like any teachers manual I am currently using. On top, is a baby monitor (obviously), a fan (cuz its hot in there at the moment) and a basket that holds some of my felts for our felt board.

The blue rubbermaid thing holds more supplies, but mostly paper things. Notebooks, loose leaf paper, etc. Things I want to keep away from littles is in there also, like glue, glitter etc. I have more of that with our art supplies, but this is my stash for later in the year ;) On top of that are containers that hold more "teach" type things...stickers, labe;s, tacks etc :) My little ones will have to pass me to get to that stuff, so it was the perfect place to put it!

And now to the right of that...and right next to my desk is the play area where little Miss Baby A will spend most of her time while we are "schoolin". There arent many of her toys in there yet,. but will be soon :) The idea is to have her close and within site at all times. She is starting to crawl so I may need to reconfigure things, but I hope to keep it basically the same and just train her to stay on the rug there while we are working in spurts. Of course, the 2 and 5 yr old like to play here with her as well :)

 This wall WAS going to hold these cool shelves made from rain gutters, and still might, but I am still debating since it will not be a permanent fixture for me and might be more work than its worth. I really like the idea though, and will be using it in our future school room. (ignore the stuff peeking out at the right,,we are cleaning out the storage closet (a walk in) in this room, which holds more stuff for our school room...will post about that later on down the road)...

 Here is the the last part of our room tour. Its the wall right next to where you enter and holds our bulletin board and a shelf of toys that I dont want to have within reach of the baby. These are school room toys and are only allowed during school. I like to change them out every week or so, so the kids dont lose interest while I am working with Big A. It really helps to have a good period of time available to just sit with him uninterrupted to go over anything he may not understand etc. I need to redo this board , but wanted to at least put it up to show where we are going to have it.

I had a lot of fun making do with what we had and putting this room together! We start school tomorrow and are so excited to get started!

PACE Storage boxes

So I have been trying to figure out a way to store our PACES that we won' be using everyday. We are using A.C.E for most of Big and Middle A's subjects and at 12 PACES per subject, I need some organization! I was planning to buy some magazine holders, but then I came across a post made by a friend of mine on my message board that had a tutorial for FREE magazine holders! I am all about frugality...so this was an inexpensive thing to stumble upon :)

Here's the tutorial showing how to make these

The ones on that site came out WAY better than mine. I am NOT a crafty mama..I can cook and bake....but crafting is just not in me. Although, it doesnt stop me from trying really hard to be like Martha Stewart..well like her with the crafts and not stocks..anyways, you get the idea ;)

Here's what they look like on my shelf!

 (hmm shoulda ironed out the creases in the fabric beforehand..oh well.)

I love these! They are NOT perfect by any means, the fabric wasnt pulled tight enough and the hot glue was drying faster than I could pull it LOL. I learned from my mistakes with the first one (the red striped one) and did a little better with the stars one. I glued in some card stock on the inside just to make it look a little finished but wasnt really worried about the bottom since its not seen (just in the pics). 

Anyways, I have quite a bit of these I need to make for Middle A's PACEs and just for coloring books etc. I was using baskets before and they were leaning every which way. These make my shelves very clean looking and lovely :)