Last year at this time, I blogged about our new school room! Unlike most things in my life, this area has remained virtually unchanged in the past year... it has worked quite well for us to have a room dedicated to our learning. We are fortunate enough to have a bonus room which serves as the "stopping point" for all things school.

Notice I say a "stopping point". We do not officially "do school" in this room. Most often we are downstairs at the kitchen or dining room table, or wherever our fancy strikes. I found it really stifled our spirit to be sitting in one place all day. This setup worked for about a week, and then we were ALL going nuts.

This is what our homeschool room is used for:

* a place to store all of our wonderful materials
* a place to display artwork, maps, etc...

* a place where mom has her computer and printer and plans all of the lessons

* a quiet place if someone needs to get away to work on a project in peace/or has an art project that needs to stay spread out for a few days.

* a guest bedroom (we have a sleeper sofa in this room, too!)

*when dad works from home (which isn't all that often); it is his "office" -- the computer is here and he can close the door and work without hearing the rest of the house.

I dedicated a full closet to our supplies:

This is the opposite side of the room... with a bookshelf for all of the teacher's resources, and also an entertainment center. The room also doubles as a guest bedroom and the Wii is hidden behind those doors. Those doors remain CLOSED during the week and only open on the Wii-kends! We may use the television if we want to watch something on Netflix streaming, and we also have a DVD/VCR for watching educational movies.

In the past year I have added a small system of shelving underneath one of the windows to hold our ever-growing library! I have countless books in boxes in our attic, too, which I rotate through the shelves. I love that these shelves are adjustable and can fit anything from our Magic Treehouse and Boxcar Children books, to larger reference books. You can also configure them any way you would like.

My favorite things are still the metal bins I purchased at Target to hold books current to specific subjects.

The longer we homeschool, the more I realize that school takes place EVERYWHERE, not just in one room of the house. It is an attitude and a lifestyle that certainly can't be contained to one room in your home.

You can have school by the fireplace when it's cold outside: