Homeschool takes over the Dining Room

This week at the Not Back 2 School Blog Hop the focus is school rooms, be that an actual room dedicated to school, or just the areas in your home where school happens.  At our house we do not have a separate room for school, so things have generally taken over our dining room, as you will see.

This is the view from our living room into the dining room.  Notice the beautiful baby gate that spans this doorway.  It is a life-saver some days!  The gate has hooks so it can be opened from either side, or removed all together.  We really only use it if the bigger kids are doing something exceptionally messy that Oliver (17 mos) would be tempted to eat.  Most of the time he just joins us at the table though.

Inside the dining room here is a view of our table.  We really need a bigger table before this baby arrives in November, we’re already out of seats.  If you look closely you’ll see four booster seats at the table.  We have one for Joseph (age 5), Emma (age 4), Daniel (age 2), and Oliver (17 mos).  While for the youngest two the big help is lifting them up high enough to see on the table, the boosters also put Joseph and Emma at the correct height for writing.  That’s important!  We do most table work together right here, handing Oliver and Daniel fun puzzles, file folder games, and math manipulatives to use while the bigger kids work.  Along one wall you can see the big bookshelf in this room.  It holds many of our children’s books and curricula.  On the left is one of our large dry erase boards we made.  Learn how to make your own dry erase boards cheaply HERE.

Turning to the left we see another small bookshelf in this room, with red pencil caddies on top from Target’s dollar spot.  We keep crayons, markers, colored pencils, glue, scissors, and more in the zippered pencil bags in these caddies.  To the left of the archway is the other large dry erase board we made, and the doorway to the kitchen.  If you go through the arch this little room has a desk for Makayla (age 9) to work. 

We have found this corner really helps when Makayla has work to do that needs concentration, like math or writing.  You can see some of our writing posters we’ve made to go along with our Institute for Excellence in Writing on the walls around her desk.  The chest freezer also fits in this room and is a handy place to put art projects that are drying.  There is a small bathroom off the other wall of the alcove, handy enough to still keep homeschool running while potty training the toddler (which is what is on the horizon here again).

Turning left again you can see the other long wall of our dining room.  Just on the right edge of the picture is the doorway into the kitchen.  I made sure to crop that off so you couldn’t see the dirty bread pans out from my late night baking yesterday.  Going from right to left in the picture we have a white Rubbermaid tower that holds miscellaneous extra craft items.  Then the piano, holding a tub of things yet to be put away, and one of my laminators, a cabinet with microscopes and piano books, and a big yellow box of playdoh tools.  The lovely large shelving unit to the left of the piano is my favorite part of this room.  This holds so much stuff!  On top are the current board games, then a shelf of art materials and curricula, and two shelves of paper and math manipulatives, science supplies too.  The bottom two shelves hold two crates for mommy, then workboxes for the four oldest children.  Hanging on the wall to the left is our magnetic dry erase board for All About Spelling.

That brings us full circle, back to the baby gate from our first picture. Looking into my living room you can see the other place we spend a lot of homeschool time:  the couch!  We do a lot of reading aloud snuggled up here as a family.  Right now we’ve got two read aloud books going (Fablehaven and The Hobbit) as well as various stories to go with our unit studies and just for fun.  That pretty much sums up where we get most of our schooling done.  Of course the kids like going in the back yard to explore, or taking work up to their bedrooms on a clipboard. 

Thanks for stopping by to see our homeschool!  Be sure to leave a comment so we know you were here.  You can also see our two semester plan for the school year, learn what we’re doing in homeschool this week, see our lapbooks, or follow our workbox adventures.