Our Schoolroom 2013/2014

 

I have promised many of you a tour of our homeschool room for months now. I finally took enough pictures (and have a little time) to put together a proper tour of our homeschool room, which is also referred to as the playroom.

It has taken me two years to really get a good feel for how I want our homeschool preschool to look and feel. We recently bought a home, which has allowed me to really think through a long term plan and organize in a way that doesn’t have to “just work” but thrive! I’m excited to finally share our set up with you.

Our home has four bedrooms. Three bedrooms are upstairs and one bedroom is in the basement. We’ve decided to reserve the basement room for our guests and the upstairs rooms for our family. I wanted to have a designated schoolroom and quickly determined our basement was too dark! We’ll instead use the basement as our media room and library space (and additional storage for homeschool materials, if needed).

Since I wanted an area with natural light and a place that’s okay to get messy from crafts, we decided to separate our schoolroom into two spaces. We chose one of the upstairs bedrooms for a common play area for our child(ren) and our dining room for crafts and messy play. Let me show you!

First here is the entire view of our playroom.

 

It’s a bedroom over the garage and closest to the street. Until our children are old enough to not be scared of the rumbling snow plow in the wee hours of the morning (or worse wake up!), we won’t be using this for a bedroom. It’s the perfect size for a common play area, and we’ve opted to keep all of our toys in this one area. We don’t keep toys in the children’s bedroom and only a few well-selected toys migrate into our living room.

 

On the left is our three Ikea trofasts pushed together with a transportation rug thrown over the top (also from Ikea). Our toddler uses this area to set up his toy train, play with his cars and trucks, and he occasionally uses it for playing with his toddler trays and other random things he thinks of! It’s basically a play table that can turn into anything throughout the day!

 

 

Underneath is where I store all of his learning toys that he has access to at all times. I printed off a picture of each learning toy from the manufacturer’s site, printed on card stock, laminated, and used Velcro to attach them to the bins. This has been a wonderful way to help my toddler put his toys back where they belong. I got this idea from Carisa at 1+1+1=1.

Learning toys he always has access to:

• Wooden blocks
• Wooden letter blocks
• Magneatos
• Stacker Pegs
• Mega Bloks
• Bristle Blocks
• Dress up clothes
• Train set
• Various musical instruments (including this set)
• Soft letters (I picked up from a thrift store)
• Cars and trucks
• Various animal toys
• Little people
• Puppets

 

To the right of this area you’ll see our toddler trays. I explained all about this area in this post – A Guide to Using Toddler Trays.

 

 

Along the back wall you will find his rotated toys in the corner, a shelf (from Ikea) of manipulatives and various sensory items (stored in various glass jars), a couch (from Ikea), and all of our children’s books. We spend a lot of time reading on this little comfy couch! This is our favorite place together in the playroom.

 

On the right side of the room, you will see his small table and chairs (from Ikea), a shelf (free from my husband’s office) full of wooden puzzles, an easel (from Ikea) with chalk, and my desk area.

I have a calendar and other various things on the wall, but we don’t really use this area right now. I plan to transform this wall into something different soon, but for now this is what it looks like. I try to keep a pad of paper and colored pencils on his table for him to explore, if he wants.

 

The wooden puzzles are a constant area of enjoyment for him. I was rotating the puzzles for him, but he enjoys them so much I was thankful to get this little shelf for keeping them all in one place and accessible.

 

My desk and chair is from Ikea (no surprise) along with the shelf over top. I mostly store extra books, notecards, and various office supplies for grown ups in this area. I also have a file cabinet (from WalMart) to corral more office supplies and store all our paperwork. On top is our printer and laminator – two things that see A LOT of action each week! Underneath my desk in the green bin, I store all of our printables. I use this method I learned from Carisa at 1+1+1=1 for storing all of our themed printable packs.

 

Finally, the closet in this room is used for storage. I explained more about this in our toddler trays post. I store additional curriculum, learning toys, and random sensory items in the closet. This is off limits to our toddler, but he’s sneaky and will often be found pulling out additional toys to play with. This is one of the reasons why I want to get this area moved to the basement.

 

Then downstairs in our dining room I store all of our craft supplies along with all of my planning materials. Both of the storage bins come from Ikea and we absolutely love them. I have not had a chance to label them, but it’s on my list of to dos.

In the drawers of the floor trofast, I have felt, stickers, foam stickers, construction paper, coloring books, card stock, play dough, and toys to go with the play kitchen. Not all of these bins have been filled and a few stand as a gathering place for random toys that migrate downstairs. This is a constant work in progress for me.

 

On top of the floor trofast, I have our sensory bin, preschool workbooks/curriculum notebooks, and a couple of storage draws (from WalMart) for storing our week’s printables for intentional toddler time, which consist of the Before Five in a Row Curriculum right now.

 

On top of of the wall trofast you’ll find our acrylic paints, do-a-dot paints, crayons, markers, and stamp collection. Inside the bins you’ll find additional art supplies such as water colors, paint brushes, glue, glitter, scissors, etc. This is still a work in process, but I’m loving it overall!

On top of the play kitchen is bins and folder for art work and school work we want to save. This has just made my life easier because instead of papers piling up everywhere, I have a place to throw everything I want to save. I’d rather this be stored elsewhere (because I like pretty and this doesn’t look pretty), but I also like efficiency and having access to this bin and binder means I actually stay on top of the paper work.

Any work we do from this area is done at our dining room table on the hard wood floors. Having this area has been so helpful. I originally had all of this in our playroom, but playing freely with paint on carpet was too stressful. It’s easier to corral the mess and having these materials in a common family area means we all engage in creative play more often. We love it!

So that’s our schoolroom and/or playroom for 2013-2014! I’m so glad to finally get to share it with you! If you saw something I didn’t talk about or have questions. Let me know in the comments and I will do my best to answer!

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