Our School Room

Here's our dining room table on a typical day of school...it's usually a rush to get everything put away at dinner time when the gang is starving. (We've been sick - notice the enormous hand sanitizer and Kleenex box...essentials to our lessons this week.)

Other essentials for our lessons - personal sized white boards & markers, crayons, mama's family homeschool planner opened at the bottom left, teacher's manuals (I'm actually starting to use the math answer page for Eli so I don't have to add multiple 2 digit numbers in my head :o)! ), good reading material, math fact cards, lots of pencils (because we are constantly stealing each other's), pencil sharpener (for when you've been left with the only broken pencil because someone else stole your sharpened one)...

The "school" cabinet...where I store all the supplies we use in a day...it sits in the living room right next to the dining room where the magic happens.

It's amazing what you can hide behind closed doors though this cabinet is pretty organized!

The "school books" - Elijah's is the top one, Luke's is the one below, Mama's stuff is tucked in on the sides of both shelves. That horizontal stack of papers...my "junk" pile of stuff I want to keep but don't have a decent place to store it. We use plastic desk file sorters to hold all the books up otherwise it's a slouching, sliding mess...hoping to find another one for $.99 at the thrift store instead of paying $14.99 again.

The two bottom shelves hold all sorts of manipulatives for math especially and lots of stuff to keep Isaac busy - puzzles, magnetic letters, and small games. We keep crayons, markers, stickers, paper, etc. in the dresser to the left of the school cabinet. The top shelf of the cabinet holds things I don't want little fingers getting at easily - tape, permanent markers, batteries, sticky notes, white boards, etc.

I would love to have a dedicated room for "school" but I know that we'd still end up at the dining room table. It's really more of a desire for an office/library/school book storage room so I don't need to have it all in my main living area. But, what we have works, so I shall not complain!!!