Not Back To School Blog Hop - School Room

 

I have been so busy I forgot to do my  School Room post. I was commenting on my friend and TOS Captain Heidi's blog at Reviews and Reflections.  It was seeing her post this afternoon that prompted me to work on this. This is part of what I said in the comment. "Not only do we not have a separate classroom but my dining room looks like a classroom. NO "House Beautiful" here. Our house looks like some I have seen in the homeschool blog world but definitely not like the homes in the magazines. I like pretty, too, but functional is much better. I am sure we are all doing the best we can with what we have to work with." No, our home is not perfect but I am thankful for it nonetheless. 12 years ago we were living in a 10 x 40 mobile home with 4 kids. Remembering that makes me thankful for our Habitat home.

We have books everywhere. These are the living room bookcases. We have 3 more like the large one on the left in our upstairs hallway. We also have one bookcase in every bedroom (our daughters actually have 2 in their bedroom), too. I also have books in boxes and tubs all over the house that don't fit on the shelves. They are under tables in my room, in front of the closet in my bedroom, stacked next to the bookshelves in the hallway and in the basement, too.

Below you see our dining room table being used for Science class. The boys are "playing" with our physics K'nex sets. Our table often looks like this. This is our primary place for doing school.

These are our workboxes. Not ideal. Not pretty. Not expensive. A mishmash of a few plastic containers we already had and a bunch of various sized boxes. They work for us though. They are easy and cheap to replace. With my husband out of work they will not be replaced with more expensive ones any time soon. But they do the job and keep us organized, especially me. I have our week planned out, the pages all printed that we will need, the resources gathered and I prep the boxes and have them all ready for the boys. 

When the boys are done their workboxes they set them on the floor next to the end of the table where I sit. I look them over, grade them if needed, write anything I need to write in my school log, and then prep the box for the next day.

One of the things we like about homeschooling though is that education can occur all over the house and outside the house also. In the recliner in the living room, in the kitchen for science experiments and cooking, all over the house for Home and Life Management, outside for Home and Life Management things like car and house repair as well as gardening, in the basement on our exercise equipment and at Winterthur where we do Nature study and get exercise walking in the lovely gardens.

This is our white board... this is now the little white board. I use this for writing the assignments for the day on that the boys do. I did move it from this wall to the wall over the workbox shelf. The large whiteboard below is now on this wall. This also shows how I display our art study. I print the art on 8x10 paper and put them on the wall in plastic pages. The art pages are also now on the wall over the workboxes.

This is our new whiteboard. It is 4' x 6'. I especially got it for our writing program, Institute for Excellence in Writing. They boys say they like writing now. That in itself is a miracle. Here you see it decorated for the arrival of my friend Becky. This is a piece of shower board we got at Lowes and had them make one cut for us to make it fit our wall. It works great and was cheaper than the small whiteboard I bought last year... about 1/2 the cost actually.

One of my blogging friends mentioned that everyone was showing their schoolroom as clean as can be and so perfect that it made her jealous. I hope these REAL live photos help with that. This shows the current state of affairs in the end of our school room with the workbox shelves and small whiteboard.  The filing cabinet that has a lot of stuff in it. It does not show the boxes and stacks of papers in my room and in the basement that need to be filed. It does show that we have workboxes on the shelves and on the floor a typical thing for our house. Sometimes... horrors... they stay on the floor all day and night and don't get put back on the shelves for days.   

You can see my chair in both pictures so that will give you an idea of the size of the room. The table takes up most of the space and we have to pull it away from the windows in order for someone to fit back there for dinner. The dining room is 17' x 8'. You can also see that we don't have doors on the closet on the left. They kept getting hit because they stuck out and we couldn't get by them, they were bi-fold doors. So we just took them off. Also we only have 3 chairs left from the set that are unbroken. We need a new dining room set or at least new chairs. That will probably have to wait until my dh gets a job. My son is sitting on one of our computer chairs. When we have dinner my daughter brings her desk chair down from upstairs and one of my other kids sits on a glider rocker's foot part. The rocker is broken in the basement. Anyway this is the current state of our table when we are doing school. You can see the white board on the right. If I need to write on there Nathan, the one in green sitting on the right, has to move over to the left side so I have room to stand there.

This is my workbox. Sort of. Here I keep the school log with the workbox plans for the week and the record of what we do each day, oh and our attendance charts. It also holds all the resources we will use this year on a regular basis. This includes my History unit study planner, my Science unit study planner, our lapbook information portions (in report covers), the teacher books for our writing curriculum, folders with resources for our Art, Music, Hymn, and Poetry study, the Great Science Adventures books for science, and a bunch of other stuff.

Well that is our School Room. I hope you enjoyed seeing it. Check out the other School Rooms by clicking the button at the top of the page or by clicking the calendar below.  Next week is Student Photo Week.