Our Homeschool Room

We use the home office for most of the day. School spills into other rooms for watching documentaries, reading, and labs. But, everything else happens in here. There’s indirect sunlight all day long, making it a very pleasant place to spend several hours a day. And, with all the workspace, bookcases, and officey stuff already in there, it was also the least expensive room to convert.

The bookcase to the left holds all the materials my son needs. The letter-tray-wire-basket-things slide completely out, which is very handy. We each have a basket for our daily work. Each night, I fill his basket with the work for the next day and pull out all the completed papers. My basket has things like the attendance sheet, lesson lists for the current units, work to be filed and any worksheets for the current week. File folders with the tabs cut off fit in there nicely, helping keep the different piles apart.

There is also a basket for each core with reference guides and other miscellaneous stuff we might need to get to quickly. For example, the English basket includes lists of themes, character traits, and common transition phrases. There are also baskets for supplies, like notebook paper, dry erase boards and page protectors. The white box is filled with my son’s pens, pencils, a calculator, and rulers. Lab supplies live behind the doors at the bottom.

The bookcase to the right has all my planning supplies. Each core has its own binder to hold future and completed work. I pull out what’s needed each week and sort everything by day.  These are then set aside in a folder in my basket. Several units were planned out over the summer for each subject, so at this point, I just have to grab the next four or five lessons from each binder. It takes less than 30 minutes to get set up for the week and about 10 minutes a night to swap things out for the following day. I spend another 30 minutes a week logging grades and notes.

Most days, we work facing each other at the green table, with my son in the swivel chair and me in one of the black side chairs. Right behind me, under the timeline table (to the far right in the first photo), is this box with all the odds and ends I seem to need during direct instruction lessons: answer keys, large dry erase boards, pens, and a calculator.

When this room was just my home office, we had a comfy couch in place of the timeline table. The kids have recently snagged the couch for the game room. And, the artwork used to be less schooly – although I’m enjoying our homemade posters and laminated US map so much, they may be there permanently. However, as soon as we’re done with the timeline, I’m bringing my couch back!