Before and After: Our New Homeschool Room

Way back a few months ago, half of our toy room was dedicated to my craft supplies.  It was kind of organized, but not particularly pretty or anything, and with the busy-ness of life, I wasn't really using the space anyways.

It basically just became a place for me to store things, although I did pull out materials occasionally for the kids to use, or to make a thank you card.

But mostly, stuff just sat on the shelves.  So I moved my craft supplies up to our extra bedroom at the top of the stairs.  They're still sitting in there, mostly on the floor, because I kept the shelf downstairs for school stuff.  Craft stuff can wait, for now.

So that was before.  Here's how the room looks today:

We have an extra table from Jesse's office at church that he wasn't using (and it was kind of in the way, so moving it over here actually helped).  We still don't have chairs, but we'll figure that out this week.

We have our world map on one wall, which we bought before last year, and above that is a free poster I ordered earlier this year with the three branches of the government.  Not something we're covering this year, but still, I think it's good to have educational things that are a bit above the level you're working on, and with primaries and elections coming up over the next year, I'm sure we'll talk about it a bit.

This bookshelf was a gift from a church member, I think?  It ended up in our garage, so I pulled it in and cleaned it off for school stuff.  Here's what's on there:

• Blue basket: Math manipulatives, lacing cards, geoboards.  Numbers stuff.
• Red basket: Alphabet activities.  Lots of letters.
• Green basket: Currently holding a few random things, but probably where I will put Matthew's work each day for math and reading.
• 1st shelf: Also currently just holding random things.
• 2nd shelf: Jonah's shelf.
• 3rd shelf: Matthew's shelf.

I finally had the brilliant idea to give each boy his own spot to put projects, treasures, and random things he wants to keep (most of which I look at as clutter, but I'm trying to let the kids keep what they want).  So this way, they have a spot, but they're limited.  Why it took me 5 years to come up with this, I don't know.

The other wall has our U.S. map, our calendar with days of the week on the left and months on the right, and some extra alphabet signs.  Plus my white shelf.

The shelf holds my extra supplies.  Laminator, class work materials, normally all my manuals (but they were in the other room for planning), and on the bottom shelf, all the brown paper that's come in our Amazon packages lately, which will be perfect for larger projects.  No matter how hard I try, I'm a bit of a hoarder of craft project supplies.  I also have a few empty extra containers, because I'm sure we'll use them.  The brown table sticking out is the sewing machine I got from my Grandma Winter, which I haven't learned to use yet, so for now it's an extra flat surface.

So there you have it!  Craft supply storage to homeschool room!