Our School Room – Back to (Home) School 2013

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My favorite post of the carnival! It’s time to share your school spaces. I’m not encouraging school room envy. We’ve had whole school rooms, we’ve had school stuff spread throughout the house and done school at the table. Now is the time to share how you’re using the space you have and what works for you!

I’m particularly excited about this one because we have a new school space. Technically, a little breakfast nook area off of the kitchen, the nook was originally open to a sun room on the other side. When we moved in, we built a wall to turn the sunroom into a bedroom for Catie, creating the perfect little area for our school stuff. About 10 X 11, it’s a nice little space.

Here’s a look at our school room as it stands right now, it’s not quite ready for the new school year but it will be soon!

The kitchen island slides, so I pulled it into the kitchen so you could get a better look at our space.

This white table can be my spot, it can be a snack spot by pulling it out and bringing the chairs around it. It also doubles as more work space for the kitchen! I can sit a kid down with a cutting board or to grate cheese, etc. I didn’t intend to leave the table in there after I got all the desks but it fits nicely on the other side of the island, so, I’ll leave it there.

If I pull the table forward into the kitchen, too, we can get an even better look at our school area. Over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up our workcharts and bookcases. While doing that, I’ve been purging, too. The books on the bottom right shelf are marked to “Go.” 😉

Over the weekend I shared a few needs that need to be met in our school area, one of which was some kind of paper station. I looked for some kind of mail or paper sorter at Walmart but I ended up going with some stacking letter trays. Here’s our paper station (and our science experiment box above it.)

Our bookcase also stores craft and other school supplies: 

And all those other supplemental learning tools: 

While the kids won’t be required to sit at their desks all day long, I want to have a place where they *can* sit down to work if they’d like. They also have bean bag chairs they can bring out during reading time, or they could retreat to their own rooms for individual work.

Over the weekend we picked up the corner desk for Catie, which will help make the best use of space down the wall. I’m considering hanging a couple of shelves on the wall between the bookcase and corner, but we’ll see.

The other two desks (simple and straight with cubbies on one end) haven’t arrived yet, but they should today! The drawer unit you see will be moved to the office, and the piano keyboard is going to go… somewhere… so that they other two desks can go down the wall in front of the window. For now, they will each use one of our extra dining chairs (the metal/padded stackable chairs we have for extra guests.)

At the end of the wall of desks is our school computer, which will stay there but perhaps not on that printer stand. After all the desks are in, I’ll see how much room we have left and find or build a piece the right size to better hold and seat someone at the computer. I like having the computer there because then I can watch Hulu or listen to Pandora while I’m cleaning in the kitchen. =)

Also, around the corner from the whiteboard and workcharts is a big empty wall space that holds our bulletin board:

For summer school we have all been sitting around the white table with chairs pulled from the dining room. It will be really nice to get the rest of it set up and have so much room and so many options.

How are you using the space that you have?

Back to (Home) School 2013 – School Room

Also linked with the annual “Not Back to School Blog Hop” – hop over there for LOTS more school room posts!