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I've been in a little dilemma recently concerning our school room and how to organize it for the upcoming school year. I posted my dilemma to some of my yahoo group friends, and received some wonderful suggestions. I thought since there had been a lot of discussion on the groups about getting the school room organized, and I myself have been in that mode for a few weeks, that this was a great time to post this to my blog. I'm going to also share some pictures of the completed project. Now, most of the things in the pictures I already had for storage, but I wasn't using them to their full potential. The only things I recently purchased are ...
1. A filing crate
2. Two sets of plastic 3-drawer containers
The School Room/Office
Our school room looks like this...We have a basement with access to the back yard so we get a little natural light in here. Many years ago we made about a 400 sq.ft. "L" shaped area by sheetrocking the walls, adding a closet with shelves and painting. The area was initially a play room for the kids, but when we began homeschooling it became more than that. Over the years it has evolved into an all purpose room....play room, tv room for the kids to watch their videos, my office with a computer area for the kids to play games, our school room, and the piano room for my son to practice. It's difficult to keep everything separate, but the space is big enough that when we are doing school we can pull a long folding table into the middle of the floor for doing school work.
For storage I have...
* an old wooden bookcase someone donated to the cause, and my dh built me a nice big bookcase out of MDF...both of which we painted with white enamel paint (but still I don't have enough shelf space),
This is a picture of my two bookcases. Do you think we have enough books? I have more in storage, and more upstairs. I'm just waiting for a large house with a library that has wall to wall bookshelves! LOL
* a desk we made by sanding/staining/sealing an large piece of plywood and placing two pieces of furniture (filing cabinet and an old "too small" computer desk) under it on each end. The desk space is large enough for two computer work spaces and for me to spread out my papers and clutter it up. I've made an "L" shaped work area by having this desk in the corner and my bookcases side by side pushed up against the desk.
This is a picture of my desk. (psst...don't look at the things under the desk...those are things I still have to sort through, but we'll just pretend everything is finished...Oh, and the white crate beside the filing cabinet is the filing crate I bought and filled with our school papers, but I'm getting ahead of myself.) Here is a closer look at the desk I use...
To solve my problem of not having enough book storage space I've stacked 4 milk crates (turned on their sides), and I use these for storing various things...one has magazines we will use for cutting out pictures for projects, two contain 3 ring binders that hold my kids Thanksgiving study/history notebooks/math notebooks/etc., and the top one is basically empty right now. It has a couple of things that I just threw in there for now, but when school begins I think that will be where we will store this years notebooks.
It was easy to stack these milk crates and they are heavy/sturdy enough they won't topple over. I've considered connecting them with tie straps, but that would make them heavier to move it I decide to do something different.
My filing cabinet is only two drawers and it is mainly filled with personal paperwork and a drawer for storage of old school records and things I don't access much. I don't have a good place to put another filing cabinet and wanted to have easy visible access to papers that we will use daily in school so I purchased a plastic filing crate for about $4 at the local dollar store. In it I'm filing cardstock, drawing paper, notebook paper, notebooking pages, lapbooks we will do for school this year, pages I've copied out of my TM that are assignments for the kids to do throughout the school year, and blank planning and lesson recording pages that I'll need throughout the school year. I think this will make it easier for the kids,, and myself to find what we need quickly because it will all be in the same place.
We had an over abundance of markers, crayons, colored pencils, writing pencils, ink pens, etc. We stored them in plastic shoe box sized containers with lids and stacked them on a tall shelf in the old bookcase. I found that didn't work well because the lids never got put back on the box, the boxes ended up in the floor instead of the shelf, and the boxes took up too much space on the shelf. So, I purchased some of the small plastic drawer units...the kind that have 3 drawers per set and can stack on top of one another. I already had one on the shelf and the shelf was just tall and wide enough to stack two columns of two drawer units side by side. Now I have one drawer each for crayons, colored pencils, markers, writing pencils, paint, stamps and stamp pad (2 drawers), pens, scissors and punches, office supplies (staples, paper clips, etc.), glue (liquid and glue sticks), rulers and other miscellaneous items.
Here is a picture of my new and improved storage for all of those little things that need to be kept organized.
The Play Area
The kids were busy this past week cleaning out their toy closet. They had outgrown a lot of things, and had some things that just weren't worth passing on to anyone else. We usually clean out the closet every summer and before or after Christmas, but this year we didn't get to it at Christmas time. Therefore, we had a full years worth of cleaning out to do. The kids did a great job! We took out two 33 gallon trash bags of broken toys, kids meal toys, toys with too many missing parts, papers they had doodled on and didn't want to keep, etc. We also donated two more bags of items to a local charity. Now the closet is clean, contains only the things they wanted to play with, and everything is easily accessible. Just outside the closet door we placed some racks and a basket for games, puzzles, building logs, etc. These had always been stored in the closet, but just seemed to get lost in there, or the kids couldn't reach them so they didn't bother to play with them. Now they are more accessible and they've already been busy with several of these items. They feel like they've had Christmas in July!
You can see the game rack beside the closet door, and on the other side of the picture is our entertainment center (thanks to a dear friend who didn't want it anymore when they moved). There is also a wooden chest beside the entertainment center that holds dress up clothes.
Here are the results of my kids hard work cleaning out the closet. the totes in the bottom hold large doll accessories and dolls and one tote is for Discovery Toys (I was once a consultant). I take some of these toys to church for my 3-5 year old class to play with while we are waiting on everyone to arrive on Wednesday nights. Keeping them in a tote helps me keep them organized so I know where they are when I need them. We also stacked the old encylopedias on the top shelf until we decide what to do with them.
This is a view of the wall opposite the entertainment center. Sometimes the girls like to use these desks, and other times they like to use the table like their brother.
I don't remember where I read (or heard) this, but I think I'm going to do it. The idea is to provide a place to display the children's artwork, so I'm going to attach some string to the wall, give the kids some wooden clothes pins to decorate with paint, and allow them to clip their artwork the the string with the clothes pins. I'm so glad this will eliminate all those little thumb tack holes in the walls!
Well, that does it. Now you've had the tour. It's not much to look at, but it sure beats having to store all of this stuff upstairs. Space is tight up there, and I don't know where we would put anything if we didn't have this basement space. I'll just keep thanking God for His provision, and if they day ever comes that He blesses us with a bigger house I'll thank Him some more.
Blessings
"The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace." Numbers 6:24-26
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