Project: The School Room aka Dining Room

Whenever someone asks me about having a dedicated school room, I laugh.  I am a home schooler.  We do “school” all over the house.  I like to do read alouds in the living room.  We listen to audio books and watch educational dvd’s in the family room.  Lately Tailorbear has been taking her stack of school work and hiding out in her bedroom.  Turtlegirl prefers to camp out on the futon in the family room whereas BooBear takes up residence on the couch next to the icon corner in the living room.

I rarely require them to sit at the table or a desk.  We gravitate to whatever area seems most logical at the time.  Science experiments in the kitchen, independent reading in the living room, Latin in the family room so we can watch the lesson on DVD and use the computer to listen to the audio pronunciation cd.

But this past weekend, I realized that educational resources have taken over my dining room.  I tend to use the dining room table for “seat work” with Supergirl.  We have bookcases, cabinets and other storages for school books, notebooks, pencils etc.  We’ve got maps and a measurement poster decorating the walls.  It looks more like a school room than a dining room.  And it is a mess!

So my first big project of 2012 is to organize the dining room  school room.   Ok confession time.  We hadn’t eaten at the dining room table in ages and ages.  And the table became a catch all so that I couldn’t even do school at the table with Supergirl. 

The cleaning out and organizing is a longer term project but I did want to share one before picture and then a picture from tonight’s nice clean table.   I hope to share more before and after pictures as I complete different parts of this project.

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I had the table all cleared off before I started the organizing project.  The table quickly became the place to shove everything as I emptied cabinets.  It got worse before it got better.   Below is the table just before we served dinner.  I like using placemats at meal times. It helps to create the idea that it really is a dining room!  These are my favorite placemats for January.  Sometimes I even use them in February because there are hearts.

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Have you started any projects for 2012?  Does the New Year mean new plans for you?

Comments

  1. It always gets worse before it gets better!
    Good job! Looks fabulous!
    Do you eat in the other room?

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  2. These are my favorite types of posts to read. I love to find out how other people do school. We use multiple rooms as well. I just can't picture us going to a "school room" to do school. And actually staying in that room while doing school is even more unfathomable!

    ReplyDelete

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