September 25, 2012

Homeschool room in a small space

Living in a condo, we don't have a lot of room to dedicate solely to school. While my initial dreams were to convert our large upstairs office space into one of those fancy, bona fide "school rooms" you see all over Pinterest, I realized that I'm rarely upstairs during the day and almost all my duties as a homemaker involve my presence downstairs. The much wiser choice was, unfortunately, entirely to obvious:  use our living/dining area for all of our main learning activities. (The decision did not come without a big helping of disappointment on my part -- I wanted to sit my kids down and educate them in full Martha Stewart style, by golly!)

So instead we have a small child's table and chairs, bookcase and a few wall hangings in our dining room next to our kitchen table. It's not as glamorous as I had hoped, but it is functional, budget-conscious and, yes, the kids learn perfectly fine. ;)


On the far left we have our Morning Board where the kids begin each day. To the right of that my husband put up a white board where I can quickly and easily demonstrate a concept to the kids. (Or, you know, let them draw for a good half hour...)

I also use the white board to display the vowel cards I made for use with the reading program (The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading) I'm doing with my kindergartner. You can buy the cards but it's so much easier and cheaper to just DIY-it and come up with a reason to break out the laminating machine.

Below that I have a bulletin board for religious education and our address/phone number sheet. This is also where I display the 1-100 number chart.


This map (from Costco, of course) is one of my favorite parts of the whole set up. The kids are fascinated with it!


This neat little hutch and drawers holds most everything the kids use during the day. I store all the puzzles, coloring books, games, art supplies, reading tools, etc. here.



Finally, tucked away under our bar counter:




Free Printables



2 comments:

  1. What a great set up! I spied some Bob books -- those are a favorite at our house too :)

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  2. Don't you just love them?! They make reading so much fun because the kids can succeed after only learning the basic letter sounds.

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