Re-arranging time - The School Room

I am fighting a never ending battle with the school room. It never seems to have enough room and never seem to stay tidy! Especially now that we have no playroom the school room floor and our entrance way floor are the 2 main play spots.

So this time while Peekers was home I spent a whole day and re-arranged the room and the contents. I did have to keep shooing kids out and in the end banned the lot of them from the room until next week when we start school again. All these "new" things they just had to explore them.

The school room is the "formal lounge" It is an open space straight off the entrance way to the house but we have closed it off with a number of bookcases to give us more of a separate room plus we had to put the bookcases somewhere! The 1st photo shows looking in through the "door" into the school room. On the left is our couch - this is an old bed with a back built on it by Peekers - a bed was a cheap solution to finding a couch that would fit everyone on it for story time! We put foam along the back with cushions in front of this. (Foam and cushions were a hand on from someone. One day I plan to make new covers for the cushions but until then they do the job).

close up of our "couch".

Next to the couch is a huge set of drawers. 2 drawers are

full of DVD's another of paper and books for cutting and another full of Mum's bits. On the floor in front of the drawers is a pile of Mum's stuff still to sort! On top of the cupboard is 2 printers and a box for bits and pieces - pencil sharpeners, erasers ect... All the things that need to be out of Monkey's reach!

In front of the cupboard is Monkey's desk. She loves having her own special desk just like everyone else!

Along the back wall is the computer desk, then Zebra's desk and around the corner is Duckie's desk and then Bunny's desk. Above Duckie's and Bunny's desks is a big white board that was being thrown out at one of the places Peekers worked at. I love it.

Above: 1) Zebra's Desk 2) Duckie's Desk with Bunny's at the end 3)Bunny's desk & more bookcases

Below are close up photos of book case corner. The bookcase containing the DVD player is opposite our couch. We don't have access to TV network so the girls can only watch DVD's and Videos of my choosing. No time wasting TV, not that we have time for it anyway. On the shelves around the DVD player are our continent books. Each shelf is divided into a continent and on the shelf are all the books we have for that continent. I hope to add boxes with games and picture cards and other things relating to the countries as we study them. (More on this later). I still need to go higher on top of this bookcase and sort the stuff out on top so please excuse the mess!

The other bookcase contains games and other things for Monkey and Bunny to do during school time. These are special games - only for school time. I am trying to set them out Montessori style. I would love to have more space to use more Montessori ideas but you can't have everything.

So this is our new arranged school room hopefully it works and stays tidy for longer!