New school room???

[jec3113]

We are currently working from the kitchen table. It is no longer working for me and I want to take over the dining room that we do not use. Has anyone here gone from a small space to a larger one? Did you find that it made things better or am I just hoping? For example, the kicking each other under the table, no space to hang posters, etc. Mom having to sit on a barstool b/c she has no desk of her own.....Any input?

[tiredmommyof8]

Not much help from me but we recently moved and I am trying to decide which room to use. I am seriously thinking of taking over the garage and enclosing it and making it into my office/sewing studio/classroom. That way when the kids are busy doing their thing I could be doing what I need to do on the computer or with my sewing or whatever. We would still be in the same room and close to the kitchen and a bathroom. I thought about kicking some of the kids out of the bonus room/bedroom but there is no way I can spend the majority of the time upstairs all day and there is no room for my stuff up there. We do have an unfinished basement but right now without heat and air it is too stuffy and basementy for me. I'd love to see what you wind up doing.

[SailorMom]

I liked it simply to be able to put things away when we were done.

We have been much more organized in a bigger space. It doesn't have to be huge - but big enough to have enough shelves and drawers for storage, and room for good chairs.

[happypamama]

I love having a nice big cheery schoolroom! The space is wonderful. DD has her own desk, and the two boys share a table. I also have a huge desk of my own. Everyone can be together and yet not be on top of each other. In my case, we have three rooms in the front of our house; one is twice the size of the other two. One of the smaller rooms is probably supposed to be the formal dining room, but the kitchen in the back of the house is a big country kitchen, so we use that for the dining room. The "dining room" is the playroom, and the other small room is the living room; I opted to make the large room the schoolroom instead of the living room.

[Dmmetler]

We took over a spare bedroom as the schoolroom. Even though we often don't "school" at a desk (DD is still at the stage where a lot of our school time is "Read together on the couch" time), it's been wonderful to have a place for everything to go. And since DD is on a "I want to go to school" kick, being able to decorate the school room has helped mitigate that a lot.

[RahRah]

In the spring I made the big move into the dining room here! It's working much better for us now that we have a central location for everything homeschool.

 

I lined our long wall with three shelf bookcases that are just almost as high as the chair rail - so I have five of them and they hold all the books, supplies and kits, by subject. My buffet serves as the "in progress" holding area to move things we're working on as we're finishing up for the day on whatever the project(s) is and want the table space back. It also holds some of our science equipment.

 

We have a fairly large dining table (seats 10), so in the middle I keep an assortment of pens, pencils, markers, crayons and other doo-dads in canisters/cup holders.....and along one side (that we've moved away the chairs) are our main books we use daily by subject. That way, when we're doing our work, I pull off the pile and we get that done, then put it back, and go to the next pile.

 

We have a big basket we rotate books in and out - these are our reading selections for the week - throughout the week we'll get through all the books in the basket and start anew the next week.....when I'll put all the books we've finished back on the shelves and pull those we'll need for the next week and put them into the basket.

 

Having the wall space to put up posters and timelines and all that is GREAT! And right now we have our AAS white board propped on a dining room chair on one side of the room and two chairs near it so we can do that together.

 

I still toy with the idea of creating a big school room downstairs in the room we use for storage - but for now, this is working out well for us. If we have company over and need the dining room, it's simply a matter of putting the stuff on the dining table onto the shelves, pulling out the decorations, placemats and such from inside the buffet and storing the stuff on the buffet inside the buffet for dinner. We don't do that often, but it works when we do use the dining room for a meal with guests....the posters and all that make for some interesting conversation too!

[jec3113]

UPDATE Finally got the husband to agree! :tongue_smilie: We are moving into the dining room. We are fortunate enough to also have a formal living room that is large enough to house the dining table and china cabinet along with the sofa and side chairs. Not perfect, but lets face it, how often does anyone use a formal dining or living room anymore? I will have to move one sofa into the dining room and will set up a reading area around the sofa. Have a spare TV I will put on top of the buffet for watching math DVD, etc. Then I plan on using a desk I already have for me and getting two 4 foot folding tables to serve as the kids desks. Finally I will have 3 walls for timelines, posters, etc. Should also have plenty of space to add in some 3 shelf bookshelves. Can't wait to start moving stuff! Thanks for the input, sounds like we are making a good move and it should solve some problems.