Making the Most of Our School Room

For a few years, we had a separate school room in the basement.   I liked this idea at first because it helped keep the house less cluttered, and allowed us the flexibility of leaving unfinished projects undisturbed after lessons were done.   Additionally, our Internet service is through our phone, and the only phone jack is in the basement, so the desktop needed to be there.   One huge draw back was that the basement gets REALLY cold during the winter and we'd all be freezing by the end of the school day.  Then the desktop died and we got a used laptop and a wifi router and moved our school room into the sun porch.

As you can see the sun porch has lots of windows and light.   During the winter we can sit and watch the snow pile up while we're working, in the spring and summer we watch the squirrels and hummingbirds feeding on the flowers just outside the windows.

At the far end of the sun porch is this armoire.   It used to house a small tv and a pile of VHS movies.   I relocated those items to the basement, and now the armoire neatly houses (ok, HIDES) all of our school work clutter.

 On the same end of the room as the armoire, we have a comfy sofa and love seat.  This is where most of our reading, and family conversations and entertaining of guests take place.

 The computer desk, printer and my record books are at the opposite end of the sun porch, directly behind our dining room table (which is where we do all of our actual school work).

On occasion, when we have unexpected schedule changes, we'll push the books to one end of the table while we have dinner, then just slide them back into place to finish up.

I've found that the bright sunlight during the day has been a big help to attitudes, especially mine.  During the winter, we have a cozy fire in our little woodstove,  as we sit by the windows and watch the days shorten and the darkness creeps in earlier.   

I  hope you've enjoyed this peek into our school and home.  Linking up with the 8th Annual Back to Homeschool Blog Hop.