This homeschool room tour is long delayed for no other reason than my desperate desire to slow life down, embrace little moments, and live life far from a screen. Of course, life continually throws curve balls our way too, but we are joy-filled and blessed. BUT all that is another post for another day.
Today, is all about our homeschool room. Our homeschool room, like many of the other rooms in our home, is always undergoing transformation as we acquire furniture or shuffle our existing furniture around.
Our current homeschool room looks quite different today than when these pictures were taken 6 months ago, but I thought seeing a “make-do” room would be just as beneficial to you as a finished room (which never seems to occur around here anyway).
I’ll have to post another tour of our shuffled homeschool room in the future!
My decorating style may be pegged “Hand-me-down-garage sale-curbside treasure.” We’ve spent very little money on furniture in our home thanks to the generosity of family and the providence of God. So if you tend to lean toward this decorating style, you are in for a treat today in seeing a real-life homeschool room from a real life one income, debt-free-minded homeschooling family.
Homeschool Room Tour
This picture lets you see how the homeschool room is situated in our home. The door on the right comes off our front porch and as you walk into our home the room is directly on your right. There is Mary on our little feast table. I get questions about our little Mary statue, so here is a link in case you are interested too.
While I am quite attached to the character of our Victorian home, the oak floors and woodwork lend orange cast to pictures!
Here is what the school room looks like once you step inside. There is a lot of oak going on here, and I’m not averse to painting, but there are a few items that shall forever remain unpainted.
The table is the dining room table from my parents’ farmhouse. I sat around this table for every special occasion growing up and I relish sitting here doing lessons with the next generation. Would you believe my mother picked it up for $15 at an estate auction when they were first married and penniless? It would be pure sacrilege to paint this table!
Right now the table has a vintage color schemed globe (picked up at Hobby Lobby with a 50% off coupon) and a basket of crayons on it.
I was thrilled to find the chairs after years of unrewarded searching. I paid $25 for the set of 6. Painting is in their near future, though I am constantly debating the color. It seems to me as though white chairs would be rather quickly ravaged at the hands of our 3 pint-sized vandals in this high traffic room. What colors do you mothers of littles suggest?
The oak bookshelf on the left was purchased at the same garage sale as the chairs. I paid $50 for it, a rather fair price considering the white laminate bend-under-the-weight-of-a few-books bookshelves cost nearly as much! It houses all our “in action” homeschool materials: teacher manuals, papers to file, and school books.
I vacillate on whether to embrace the “homeschool room” look or to blend our homeschool room into the more traditional style of home decor. This blue pocket wall organizer was purchased in one of those “embrace-the-homeschool-look” phases. I must say it was handy to have things posted for the littles to reference as they went about their work. In this picture I have a few sight words, a bird identification poster, and name cards to my littles can write their name at the top of their workbook pages.
Here is the oak shelf straight on. The basket on top holds pens, pencils, erasers, rulers, etc. There is a school bell and chalkboard for writing memory verses on (a much appreciated gift from my sister-in-law).
TOP SHELF
The top shelf holds my teacher manuals and the basket next to them hold file folders where I can easily file “loose” completed work for the kids. By this I mean the completed pages that aren’t intact in a workbook or subject notebook. There is usually very little in these folders. For the littles, I mostly keep art masterpieces, illustrated memorized poems, and other things I want to keep for myself. For the 11 year old, I keep tests and writing assignments.
MIDDLE SHELF
On the middle shelf I keep a variety of workbooks to use as fillers for the Kindergartener and 2nd grader. The basket on the right of that shelf contains the “middles” (the Kindergartener and 2nd graders) daily work.
They each have a clipboard which houses their work for the day. I simply rip out the workbook pages to work on and place them in the clipboard. The clipboard also holds a daily/weekly homeschool checklist, 100 chart, and penmanship cheat sheet.
BOTTOM SHELF
On the floor between the wall and the shelf is a basket for recycling the many papers we go through!
On the left side of the bottom shelf is the 3 year old’s “work.” These are really just Rod and Staff workbooks for him to keep busy during school time. The right side of the shelf is my 6th grader’s “homeschool bucket.” The bucket holds all his workbooks, notebooks, and texts.
Here is a peek inside the “To File” basket. Each child has a different color-coded file folder labeled (with my favorite labeler) with their name.
Here are the bookshelves that house history books (organized by time period), science reading and identification, art themed books ( both art instruction and appreciation), teacher’s references for planning and how-to homeschool books, math manipulatives (in the basket on the top of the left shelf), and writing references (thesauraus, dictionary, etc.).
On the VERY top of the shelves is our abacus (cannot live without) and magnetic letters.
On the top of the left shelf you may see a heavy posterboard sticking off the shelf. This houses a half-completed puzzle at the moment and is a real lifesaver for me. It allows the kids to work on a big puzzle and then put it out of the way when it is school time. When we aren’t in the middle of a puzzle, it stores behind the bookshelves.
Here is the other corner of the room. Notice I put the shoddiest looking bookshelf on that wall so it isn’t the first thing you see when you walk in our home.
The left-most bookshelf houses extra school supplies (markers, paper, etc.) on the top shelf.
The second to top shelf has our toddler activities like busy bags and playdough in the canvas containers. I like the canvas containers for the fact that they are a inexpensive way to hide visual clutter which can too often predominate in a homeschool room.
The middle shelf houses our “religious” kid books that aren’t picture books. Second to bottom has easy readers and the bottom shelf has a container with some dot-to-dot and maze books for the middle kiddos.
The top shelf of the middle bookshelf has wooden puzzles and the second shelf has some art supplies. There is an antique camera on the middle shelf (just because I like a little empty space!).
The second to bottom shelf has more easy readers. The bottom shelf has more fun activities for the older kids like Life of Fred books (which we read for fun), Mad Libs, etc. The large brown bookshelf holds all our picture books minus a few stored in the kids’ rooms.
I love our pencil sharpener and can recommend it if you are looking for a tough yet affordable option. The basket on the floor is for garbage.
I hope you enjoyed the homeschool room tour! I hope to make a few improvements post an update some day! Until then- God bless!
You may also enjoy:
Finding your Homeschool Life Verse
10 Must do’s with your Catholic Preschooler
