Our New Homeschool Room and Other Learning Spaces
Here’s an updated look at our new homeschool room, as well as our other learning spaces spread throughout our home.
It’s been a couple years since I’ve posted a tour of our homeschool room, and there have been some BIG changes. The most notable being that in January we moved our homeschool room to our basement!
Our New Homeschool Room
For the briefest of moments I considered simply purchasing a large cabinet to place in our living room to store our materials, but my youngest daughter wasn’t ready to say goodbye to our corner desk just yet and I never imagined large cabinets, even used on Marketplace, would be so expensive!!
So, shortly after Christmas we spent the better part of a week re-arranging our downstairs space, disassembling and reassembling furniture, and moving a bunch of shelves around.
It was a LOT of work, but we’re all pretty happy with the final result. While I’ll always miss our previous light-filled, west-facing schoolroom, we have so much more room down here. As much as we loved our previous school room, an adult and two quickly growing kids trying to get comfortable in a 10’x10′ space did have its challenges.
Our Plans for Our New Homeschool Room
We do still have a few more projects on our “To Do” list for this space:
- Build a piano stand. I’m hopeful our children can begin regular piano lessons this fall. Currently, our electric piano is sitting on a desk. It’s functional, but not the most ergonomically friendly.
- Create a clipboard wall. I’ve purchased the clipboards, but I’m planning on painting them with black chalkboard paint to make them more versatile. The idea here is for my children to have a space to display their work throughout the year.
- Figure out our book nook seating. I’m still undecided on what type of seating arrangement to place in the corner by our floating book racks. I’ve considered a double papasan chair, a hammock, an armchair, a daybed, or possibly even a tent with some floor pillows. As you can see, I’m nowhere near a final decision yet! We do have a Nugget that can serve as a “temporary” seating arrangement in this space as needed, so this isn’t at the top of my priority list at the moment.
We’re using the KALLAX cube shelf under the window to keep some open-ended building toys and materials that were formerly kept upstairs in our living room.
We recently rearranged our living room as well, and building space is much more limited since we added additional seating that we desperately needed. While we still have a few of the kids’ building toys upstairs, the majority of them are now located in our schoolroom.
A Closer Look at Our Montessori Shelves
Math Shelves
The baskets on the top shelf hold an assortment of games, task cards, and other hands-on math activities for our children. Our Montessori decanomial bead set is also stored here.
Math Shelves
The other side of our math shelf contains our stamp game, Montessori hundred board, golden bead set, Counting Coins activities, a trinomial cube, and a few more math activities.
Language Arts Shelf
On this shelf is our moveable alphabet, a variety of Montessori grammar activities, reading games, storytelling prompts, and digraph cards. Here again, you’ll see we utilize baskets to keep all the materials neatly organized.
Geography & Science
Next to our language arts materials is a mix of both geography and science activities. We rotate as needed. Currently, we have a collection of coins from the continent we’re studying, several puzzles, 3-part map cards, animal classification cards, a collection of rocks and minerals for sorting and classifying, and a pocket microscope with slides.
Our Other Homeschool Learning Spaces
While we use our schoolroom and it’s nice to have as it helps us have a centralized location for our materials, a lot of our learning occurs throughout our home.
Living Room
In our living room, you’ll find the majority of our board games. We incorporate as much gameschooling into our homeschool as possible. Keeping them in our living room means they’re easy to grab and play at the coffee table or take them outside to our deck.
We often gather around our coffee table or spread out on our couches for school as well. The girls work out of their learning baskets, or we dedicate this time to our Global Explorers studies.
Dining Room
Our most used materials are kept within easy reach in our main living space, too. Since we have an open floor plan, our living room, dining room, and kitchen flow seamlessly together. Our morning basket books, the girls’ learning baskets, and basic arts and craft materials are kept in this small bookcase tucked right beside our dining room table and our sliding glass door that opens to the deck.
We often use our dining table for arts and crafts, especially anything involving ink and paint. The majority of our art supplies are tucked into a hallway linen closet located near our dining room, so they’re easily accessible as well.
We also have a large chalkboard hanging in our dining room as well. It’s useful for number talks, The Writing Revolution sentence strategy talks, blackboard drawings, random notes, etc. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it yet, since it’s still one of the most used items in our homeschool.
Deck
Most of the time, my children like to take their school materials outside. Last summer we invested in an outdoor sofa, coffee table, rug, and a couple chairs so we can comfortably spend our school day outdoors. Our learning baskets are key to allowing us to do school anywhere. You can read more about how we use learning baskets in this post:
Our favorite
Homeschool Room Essentials
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