It seems that of the three areas we are focusing most of our energies on during these renovations, the homeschool room might be the first to be finished – or at least finished enough to blog about. 😉 I didn’t think we had the space for a dedicated homeschool, but when we started rethinking the main floor, I realized it was possible if I gave up my ideal of a formal dining room – at least for now. We had outgrown both the dining room and kitchen tables, so we needed to get a larger table, which probably would not fit well in the dining room and definitely not in the kitchen area. So we made the former family room (which had a lot of homeschool stuff in it) the dining/library area (more on that in future posts). And the former dining room is now the new homeschool room, and the old kitchen table fits nicely there.
Here is one corner of the room. Sorry about the quality – I wanted to get a picture with Mr. E at his little desk (which fits perfectly in front of the window!), but the glare is pretty bad.
A bit about what’s on the shelf: the boxes on top have all our Adventures in Odyssey CDs plus room for some more. I’ve been buying a few 4 CD sets a year for a few years now, and the kids look forward to listening to them during our trips to Canada. 🙂 The first shelf has a dictionary, thesaurus, miscellaneous books (many of which have been and/or might be used for Morning Time), and a stack of nature journals. The second shelf is sparsely populated right now, but does store my binder with my modified AO schedules and a few notebooks (and usually E’s timeline binder). The next two shelves have the kids’ current AO books as well as our Morning Time basket and binder. It’s so great to have all the MT things in one place – wish I’d done that sooner! The other basket has a ruler, stapler, 3-hole punch and some mostly empty Mason jars that should be holding extra pencils and things (I like this idea). It may move to the table – once there’s room for it! I was able to fit my old piano books, as well as our hymn books and psalters on the fifth shelf. I culled a few things, but those books I spent hours learning pieces from seem to be a part of me and it’s hard to let them go. Besides, I like to occasionally pull some of them out and play a few things. And my kids might use them someday, too. 😉 The bottom shelf just has an oversize atlas and the box of stuff that came with the piano (which is in another corner of the room now). Things may get moved around a bit as we get settled in and see what works best, but I’m happy about how it’s taking shape!
