School Room All Done!!

It's Tuesday, and due to some technical difficulties, I was unable to blog about my school room progress yesterday. But I'm glad to report that I stuck to my schedule this weekend and finally accomplished my goal! Our school room is completely unpacked, organized and clean!!

It's amazing how much stuff you accumulate as a homeschooler! From paper clips and art supplies, to books and more books!!! I'm posting pictures of our awesome room. I really do love it and it was one of the rooms of our new house that I was excited to complete.

What you won't see in the pictures below is our huge bonus room that is attached to the school room. It is currently unfinished, but I have put our utility shelves there to hold bins of arts & craft supplies. Also not included in the picture is a closet located by my desk. I store all our craft paper, preschool bins, manipulatives, school supplies, and miscellaneous items there.

Overall, I love our school room! A big plus of our new house is that it has LOTS of living room space (3 living rooms, 1 den, and a keeping room), so I was able to dedicate one of those rooms to our daily school without giving up space for other things (if you remember, in our previous home we used our dining room as our school room).

I love the open feel of the room!

Our lawyer's bookcases still hold our curricula as well as maps, charts, and other educational materials in the bottom, pull-out drawers. These kinds of bookcases are great when you have little kids because they can't get to the books.

Opposite our bookcases is a matching curio cabinet that I used to keep in our living room at our old house to hold figurines and china. Now I use it to hold our daily supplies in pretty jars and baskets (pencils, colored pencils, etc.)

Our bulletin board holds our daily schedule (we use MOTH), calendar, counting straws, and whatever we want to display on a particular day. My rolling cart bin has been re-labeled. Each child has their own drawer to hold math, language arts, and other subjects for work completed or work to be completed. The bottom of the cabinet is used for storing binders, computer paper, and language arts manipulatives. I kept our wooden shelves (from A.C. Moore) for teacher's manuals, BFIAR books, writing paper, and homeschool resources. On top of one of the shelves I have our letter writing box (contains addresses, stamps, envelopes, and paper), our notebooking box (for the kids to use when they need to embellish their notebook pages), and our art box (contains drawing paper and supplies).

I really do prefer that my desk and computer are not technically, in the school room. It keeps me from getting distracted. Oh...please ignore the messy cords...I didn't quite get to getting those under control!!

Upon closer look, you'll see that I have another wooden shelf by our bookcase. I keep our music player on this with CD's nearby. It also holds picture and reading books. Our dry erase board hangs between the bookcases too. The maps are on a rolling, flip board. This is great because I can change them out as I need. When I use the dry erase board, I just roll the flip board out of the way. The door on the side leads to our bonus room where I keep more supplies. I hang the kids' reading progress charts on the door as well.


Most of all, I love the windows and all the wonderful light they let in!!

Hope you enjoyed the "tour"!!!

**UPDATE**
Just a quick note if you are wondering if these are the only places we put our books in. Our school room holds only the books we use for school. Luckily, each child's bedroom has built-in bookshelves that hold more books. There are also built-in bookcases in our keeping room, which we have recently been calling our reading room. The master bedroom also has large built-in bookcases where DH and I keep our own books. In the lower living room, I also put some bookshelves to hold even more books. If we kept all our books in the school area, I don't think we'd have enough wall space to hold them all!!