Our Homeschool Room {a photo tour}

It’s finished…finally. Our Homeschool Room for 2014-2015. If you’ve been following on Instagram, you know we’ve been working hard this summer to tear down a wall, repaint wall and trim, and buy new furniture to be prepared for our new school year. Whew. It’s been A LOT of work {a BIG THANK YOU to my wonderful and supportive husband}, but so worth it.

The kids prefer to hang out in this room more than any others in the house now. We’ll see if that changes once we begin our full-time school days. Hehe.

I LOVE to see other’s teaching spaces (classrooms and homeschool rooms) and collect ideas on my Homeschool Organization Pinterest Board, so I thought I’d share a little photo tour of our space. {You can view older posts of our homeschool room here, here, and here.}
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Our Homeschool Room {a photo tour}

My goal in setting up the room was to use the space to its max since I’ll have the four kids, me and some days my mom {she’s my “teacher assistant 2-3 days a week}. I also knew I wanted the computer far away from the kids’ desks to eliminate distractions. Less distraction is a good thing!

 

When you first step in the room, the computer is off to the right positioned so the older two boys can’t see the screen when they are at their desks.

 

Since most of our wall space is gone {after we took the extra wall down}, we used the back of the computer area for the dry erase board {hubby screwed it in}. Notice the dry erase markers are up high, due to my very curious and active tot! On the bookshelf, I placed our green bin of repurposed items and other objects I don’t mind her touching. Up high are all our sensory/fine motor manipulatives that I just re-sorted and reorganized last week {a project I had put off all summer}.

 

Each of my older kiddos has their own desk {which are new to us, given to us by a family friend} with new chairs. Above their desks, I have place a couple of cork strips (to display work) and a magnetic dry erase board to write their new words or any notes for the week,

 

and an IKEA shelf with the bygel cups hanging for things like markers, glue sticks, crayons, and pencils/pens. {I do live within a two hour drive from an IKEA, but was thrilled to discover that I could order what I needed on amazon!} This idea was totally “stolen” from Homeschool Creation’s rods with cups above her kids’ desks and 1+1+1=1’s calendar shelf with cups. The lights came from a local store, but are similar to these.

NSis {2 years old} has her own little space kind of the middle of the room. This table is from IKEA {we stained the wood}. She is near all her bins of toys and manipulatives that I rotate out for her maybe once every 2 weeks…or longer if I forget. Under her table is a clear car mat like this one that I bought to protect our carpet.

On the wall beside NSis is a large bookshelf {actually made from two of these and two of these stacked and screwed together to make one unit. I wouldn’t have done it this way except I already had the two 3×3 units and just needed a little more for storage since I lost storage space when we got rid of our old schoolroom furniture}. And along the bottom are our canvas bins, filled with books. Each child has their own independent reading bin and there are a couple of extras for me.

On the top row are my teaching supplies and curriculum {I actually bought curriculum this year for the first time!}

• Mystery of History
• Words Their Way
• BOB Books {Sets 1-5 and Rhyming Set}
• All About Reading
• All About Spelling
• Apologia Science {ALuv picked Astronomy and Chemistry/Physics}
• Apologia’s What We Believe Series

Along the VERY top of the organizer are two white bins that I’m ignoring for now. They contain paper after paper after paper of unorganized chaos. They were kind of the “catch all” this summer as I organized the homeschool room. I don’t feel brave enough to tackle them just yet. 😉

 

At the very back of the room are the boys’ desks, each in their “corner”. I like that they have their own spaces for their independent and individual work, but we do a lot of work in other places as well.

 

In between the boys’ desks is one of my favorite organizational tools of all time. My IKEA TROFAST organizer! This year, we emptied out a few of the bins {top middle four} by getting rid of some toys. Now I’m using them to store art supplies, extra scissors, and construction paper. They make GREAT drawers! You can read more about our toy organization here.

 

Behind NJoy’s desk and along the same wall as MBug’s desk is this bookshelf with our books {not all our books, by any means}. The plastic tubs are for each child to store their work since there isn’t much storage space at their desks. I also didn’t have wall space for my beloved pocket chart. So I pulled out the PVC pocket chart stand my husband made years ago for me {when I taught in the classroom}. It comes apart and is stored right beside the bookshelf. If you don’t want to make a stand, you can purchase one, but I think they are kind of pricey.

 

When I need it, I assemble it quickly and stand it right up! {I almost threw this stand away a few years back, as we needed more room in our attic, and am so glad that I didn’t!}

 

Lastly, we have our calendar area, which looks bare in this image; we’ve added more since this was taken. This is an old Carson Dellosa set that I’ve probably had for about 13 years. It is behind the door of that leads to the rest of our house. When the door opens, you can barely see the calendar, which is a good thing since my 2 year old likes to pull all the numbers down on a regular basis.

 

Here’s kind of a wide shot of most of our space, with things labeled so you can get a bigger picture.

Links to Items in our Homeschool Room:

For your convenience, I’m including links to some of the things in our homeschool room.

• desk chairs for older 3 kiddos
• white dry erase board
• cube organizers {white}- we have two 3×3 organizers and two 2×3 organizers stacked together to form one shelf
• canvas bins for cube organizers
• cork strips
• 12×12 magnetic dry erase boards {above desks}
• desk lamps- I got ours at a local store, but ours are very similar to these
• Standard Pocket Chart
• IKEA shelves {above desks}
• IKEA cups
• IKEA TROFAST system
• IKEA art easel

 

So, that’s it! Our homeschool room for 2014-2015. I am praying for a good school year with good attitudes {from the kids AND me} and am so blessed to have this space to call our homeschool room.

 

See more homeschooling organization ideas here

Follow This Reading Mama’s board Homeschool Organization on Pinterest.

Enjoy!

~Becky