Back To School: Schoolroom

This week at Heart of the Matter, the Not Back-to-School Blog Hop topic is the Schoolroom. So come on in and see where we do school!

We don't have a dedicated "schoolroom". Like a lot of homeschooling families, the dining room table started as the center of our schooling. But I wasn't good at putting things away ("we'll be using everything again tomorrow"), so I would pile it on the kitchen counter, or just shove it to the end of the table. I also quickly outgrew the small cupboard space that was available near the dining room for school stuff. So several months ago, we cleaned off an extra table (our old dining room table, before there were so many people in our family!) and Ted had the idea to clean out some space in the "playroom" (our living room) to make a school area.
So this is where we did school last semester, with H and G on either side of the table, and me moving between them. The cabinet on the right used to be my pantry storage, but Ted built me a bigger unit (yay!) so this one now holds my homeschooling books. To the left is our piano, so one girl can practice piano while one starts some homework, and then they switch. The biggest challenge is still keeping the top of the table cleaned off, however!

In addition to H and G doing school (2nd grade and Kindergarten), M will now be home instead of at speech preschool, and F wants to join in as well! :-) So with our homeschooling expanding, I felt our space needed to expand, too. I found these school desks for free and recovered the chairs.

I cleaned the toys off the smaller table and moved it next to the desks (the piano is on the far right) so that F and M have a new space as well. We also do some school huddled together on the couch, which isn't pictured. H and G's desks open up so they can store their books and pencil boxes inside, so hopefully that will help with some of the clutter. The girls are very excited about their "new" school space, so I'm hoping this will work well. We'll try it and see how it goes! I said above that we don't have a dedicated "schoolroom", but the playroom is slowly becoming one!