Our new table & chairs for our school room finally got delivered today & we couldn't wait to get started!  The first thing we had to decide was where we wanted to put the table & whether or not we wanted to leave the leaf in the table.  We finally decided the more space, the better, so we did some rearranging of our original plans to make it fit, since it is a rather large table (54" by 54" with leaf in).  It is a nice, large & sturdy (and heavy!) table.  Our school room is approximately 11' by 11' with a triangle shape cut out of one corner (where the door is).  Here is a view looking out the door of our school room.  Our maps hang on the wall in the hallway.  We have a world map and a map of the United States.  Matt made the frame for our world map by using the molding that usually goes up near your ceiling and staining it a nice brown color and trimming the corners on a diagonal to fit together nicely.  We are going to be making a frame for our other map this same way, but it is not done yet.

Okay, so I am going to post pictures in the order of our room as you look counterclockwise around the room.  Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and I still have to get out all the books & make room for them.    As we love books, there are quite a few that I am going to have to figure out how to arrange!

Above is a nice double bookcase that we bought at Sam's.  The very top of the bookcase will make nice storage for oversized games or anything we want to keep out of reach of our children. 

This is the bookcase we bought:

http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&item=162674

Beside this bookcase (half hidden by the door) is this Multi-Purpose Storage Unit that we bought from here:

http://www.lakeside.com/details.asp?ITN=XMS1&CAT=0&KWD=&ST=_23

It's a little small (but perfect for that small space there) and makes a nice place to hold some our educational manipulatives.  It has four small shelves & two small drawers.  I think Matt is also going to make some small shelves that we can hang above it to make better use of our storage space.

Okay, here is another view of this same wall, plus part of the next wall.  We have four bedrooms in our house.  This particular room used to be a playroom since it has the largest closet but the smallest room size.  The closet still holds toys & games (the ones that we had before we were married, like Monopoly, that our kids aren't old enough to play yet).  Elizabeth & Katie share a bedroom, and right now Michael shares our room, but will have his own room once we get around to arranging it.  Right now it is a holding area for all the toys that we took out of the playroom.    We are still waiting on the bunkbeds for the girls to arrive (they were backordered till the end of this month), then we will be giving away the queen bed they currently share and will have more room in their room for their toys.

Okay, let me insert this brief intermission into my typing here...  

So, I had stopped at the end of the previous paragraph to save it yesterday because I had to stop typing right then.  This morning I came back to finish it.  I had typed in a lot more paragraphs about the rest of the pictures below, as well as a bunch of links I'd had to find on the internet, and was at the very end and went to insert the little smiley for ROFLOL when I did something wrong and instead of clicking on the smiley, I tried to drag it over here to this window.  Well, don't ever do it, because it totally ruins everything you typed since the last time you saved the draft and you lose every last thing since your last save. 

  Lesson learned, save OFTEN!!!  :::::going to save right now, and pull my hair out while I am at it!::::::::: 

Okay, so, here I am again!  The picture above shows our wonderful new table and chairs.  We bought a grayish/black 12 compartment organizer at Sam's to hold our workbooks & the girls' notebooks, but since it is sized to hold 8.5" by 11" paper, most of our workbooks won't fit in it the standard way.  We ended up removing all of the shelves except the top one & we will see how it works this way.  It looks something like this:

http://www.webmasterwebsites.com/woodland/images/10AC2889A_large.jpg

Our crayons & pencils are on top of this organizer, but I am thinking of placing a pretty basket on top of it to hold them so it will look more attractive.

The wall beside the window is approximately 36" and we are going to put floor-to-ceiling rain gutter bookshelves along this wall.

http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/oliver.html

http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah_chpt6_p4.html#rain-gutter

The lower shelves will hold books for our children, and the upper shelves will hold our "how to homeschool" and other teacher-type books.  Along the wall above the table, we plan to put educational posters, a dry erase board or a bulletin board.  I'm thinking a dry-erase board would be hard to write on though with the table in the way, and we already have one anyway in our living room/breakfast room area that we use to make lists and to write the date, temperature and weather daily.

Beside the wall where we will be putting the rain-gutter bookshelves is a window that is about 6' wide.  I just bought these valances (from ebay) to hang on the window:

http://tinyurl.com/eq35z

Then we have these print wall cards from Handwriting Without Tears that we plan to hang around the room (sort of like a border) near the ceiling.

http://www.hwtears.com/printwallcards.html

Above are the bookshelves that will hold our Five in a Row (FIAR) library.  We are going to keep one shelf for kid puzzles, and we have this puzzle chest for our wooden puzzles:

http://www.backtobasicstoys.com/item/productid/3742/

Michael likes them, and I want to have plenty of fun, yet educational, things in our school room for him to play with while the girls are doing their lessons.

In front of the window we have the girls' rocking chairs that Grandma made for them at Christmas one year.  I thought they would make a nice place for them to sit and read.

In the picture above is a set of mission bookshelves that we bought from Home Depot.  We added extra shelves, so there are four total shelves that are about 6 inches apart.  We are going to keep the kids' games here.  They used to be in a cabinet that was locked up and since they were out of sight, they were seldom played with.  Since our children are still so young (ages 2, 4 & 6) I want to be sure to encourage lots of playtime, with toys that will be stimulate their intellects & imaginations.  Above all, I want them to have fun! 

We also have two of those desktop apprentices that we got from staples.com:

http://tinyurl.com/l95vx

I still have to figure out exactly how I want to use them in the great scheme of things.  I think on the inside of one of them, I'm going to put some hanging files and make a file for each FIAR book that we row (a.k.a. study).  Since FIAR is geared for ages 4 to 8, it contains a wide variety of topics to cover for each book, and many are not yet age appropriate, so we will likely re-row the books again at a later date when Elizabeth is older, so we can save any related printouts, ideas, etc. in the file folder for that book to make it easier the second time around.

Since this room is carpeted, we really aren't going to be doing anything messier than crayons, scissors & glue in here.  We do have another room (the one intended to be a formal dining room, but we don't own any formal furniture as it just isn't practical for this stage of our lives) where we keep my scrapbooking/sewing stuff and the kids' craft stuff, so we can do the messier activities in there where there is a plastic table and tile floor.  I can't post a picture of it right now as it is too messy. 

Anyway, so there you have it.  I will try to come back later when we are "done" and post more pictures. 

Oh and we also have these hanging baskets in white that we plan to hang beside the tall bookshelves in the picture below (in between it and the shorter shelves).  We will probably put more manipulatives there, like maybe our handwriting ones or something.

http://www.lakeside.com/details.asp?ITN=OIQ7&CAT=0&KWD=basket&ST=_38

Thank you so much for taking the time to look at this blog post.  If you have any great ideas to share, please feel free to email me or post a comment!  Thanks!