Our New Classroom

If you read my earlier post about our classroom you’ll remember it looked like this.

This past week we changed some family dynamics, and reorganized our house and lives in many ways.  The biggest change in the house being our much bigger, much neater classroom.  Here is an overall view.

On the left side, in front of the stairs I put all of our bookshelves.   I have these broken out by readers for the current year on the small white bookcase.  Reference books are on the medium bookcase in the middle and the tall bookcase hold my family photo albums, scrapbooks, books for upcoming unit studies and books for the girls to read when they are older.

Our main work area has a long table for me to sit at and spread out my work.  I put each of the girls on an end of the table.  That way, I can keep their individual teacher guides near them as we work so I don’t have to constantly sort through books.   The storage cabinet for their workbooks fits nicely under the table where I can access it quickly when making out my weekly lesson plans.

To the right of the work area I added our double sided white board.   I really would like a large blackboard, but this works for now.   Under the white board is where I keep the girls backpacks for co-op and my bag for activity day.  I also hung up their Awana bags here so we’ll always know where they are.

Next is our newly added computer for the kids.   We picked up the desk off of Freecyle a few weeks ago.  The computer was given to me by a friend.  Now we can start working on computer skills without fear of my main computer getting destroyed.

Then here is a photo of the “old classroom” (on the opposite side of the basement) which now has a little sitting area for me, my office and crafty items.   I’ll need to add a workbench or table at some point.   But look how open it is!

I’m hoping things have a better flow now that we aren’t so cramped up.  Time will tell.  We also have a working fireplace in the middle of the basement that will hopefully be used this winter to help keep us warmer than in years past.

I’m linking back up to the Not Back to School Hop – School Room Edition.