Our Schoolroom

Here you can see the main chunk of our homeschool space, I've posted some better close-ups further down. This is where it all happens. We've got our magnetic markerboard, art shelves, school supply shelves, two bookcases, paper storage (the white converted closet shoe organizers stacked underneith the cardboard book display.)

Right now I am using the display to house our "prehistory" books for this unit. The doubled up black shelves hold all our art supplies, coloring books, how-to-draw books, art books, Child-sized Masterpiece cards, and my teacher supplies (like rubber cement, staples). The two red bins on top hold planning materials, stickers, and rolled up maps.

Our school table and farmhouse chairs are awesome, and rarely empty for long. You can't see it from this angle but there are storage shelves and cubbies underneith full of materials. The larger brown bookcase is the command center where I keep the books we use most often-- Latin, Medieval History, the Spelling Power books, games, and manipulatives, and teacher/homeschool books on top. The smaller black shelf is but one of many in our house and happens to house our religion, last years's history (ancients), and early modern/modern history books.

The skinny metal shelves (under the clock of the eras board and globe) are where I keep a bin of craft supplies and all the workbooks/teacher guides that aren't in the command center.

The black board way on top of my command center is our flannel board, right now we've got our phases of the moon felts and a sorting activity, but pretty soon it will have volcano nomenclature and layers of the earth. One trick I just discovered was to glue some sand on the back of the cards (pictures, whatever you wanted to use) and it sticks perfectly to the flannel. This is much easier than my old felt cutting/gluing routine or running out to buy sandpaper or velcro. We might not have much here in the desert, but we got sand.

Here is our "kinder" room, which is really the back half of a tiny dining area. The pocket chart is great if you've got an emergent/early reader (prek-3rd).

I hate having things spread into two rooms like this but this house is tiny. I can't wait to move and get it all together in one room. What you can't see in this picture is a plastic set of drawers with the lentil science stuff in it, a red leatherette basket with all our music books and small instruments, and our big schoolhouse wall calendar which is affixed to an old markerboard and leaning against the drawers.
The other half of the kinder room, with an old table and usual clutter of early learning stuff, mostly for Ugha but some of the workbooks are Scote's. The posters come in a two pack at the dollar tree, otherwise I'd have done without them.
Below you can see our manipulatives shelves which hold everything from pegboards, the leap pad, and cuisinaire rods to wooden blocks, geoboards, magnets, play money, car games, reading rods and marble tracks.




The weird green yarn/blue star wall display is something new I am trying this year for history, a very basic timeline for keeping track of important people. If you look closely you can see the girl and boy patterns(for male and female biographies as we encounter them) are the only thngs hung up yet, since we are not starting History again until August 1. It should look really cute once the Dodo starts making the costumes.