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how do you all teach from the living room/kitchen, etc? I know my dd would prefer to be where-ever...but I would be running around like a crazy person grabbing this and that if I"m not at my comfy little desk table doing school, where I can swing my chair around and grab what I need, printing as needed I'd be lost!

I like all my school stuff in one spot and that's in our school room. I can't imagine having to run all over the place, pulling a book from the living room bookshelves then putting it all back. Then I can't swing my chair around and just do something fun for the heck of it because it's out of sight. I have my huge bulletin board and magnetic board and all the fun stuff in one place. I wish I wasn't so "anal" about this part of it because I think dd would be a good "couch and snuggle person. How do you make this transition? A chair does not fit in our room and grabbing a book and moving down the hall to the next room seems odd for just 5-10 minutes.

So I'm good at the jumping jacks (from spin-off) but bad in every other way.

Hi Anna,

What I do, is grab what I need for History, story time, Bible and the Manual. This I will usually do in the livingroom with my children. Then I put those books back and they each have a bin with their math, language arts, phonics, readers, crayons, scissors etc. which we either do in our kitchen for the boys or our school room for the girls. You would come in the front door to our LR which opens into our schoolroom and then into our kitchen, so our rooms are more accesible to each other.

We do the left page of Bigger upstairs in a bedroom (because there's a door that we can shut to minimize our distractions). Plus, I think I'd lose Grant's attention if I made him sit in the dining room ALL morning. When we're done with that, we go down to the dining room table where he does some independent work. I take the Allison and Garret up to a bedroom to do LHTH then (so we don't distract Grant with our "active" learning.) They do their writing/cutting/gluing on the little table in our kitchen downstairs.

Moving around gives us a little variety, but the main reason is that we have no doors on the main floor of our house so we go somewhere where we can shut a door for a little bit and focus a little better.

Kathleen

We recently moved all of our schoolwork into a schoolroom for a lot of the same reasons you mentioned. For read-alouds, we have beanbags in there. That way we can stay close to the desks and don't spend a bunch of time going back and forth to the living room.

I keep all our books in a large rectangular basket, with a smaller basket on top with the smaller books and supplies. It is portable and organized, we also have a desk for my dd's desk work, which we usually do last. We cuddle up on the couch for most of the school day and then it is off to her desk for handwriting, R&S workbooks and math work. My dd is in charge of carrying her basket to the living room and I bring everything back to her "schoolroom" while she does her deskwork.

We live in a townhome, and our living room and dining room is basically one L shaped (small) room. We do school here and it is an easy tranistion from the dining table to the couch. We do not have an extra room for a school room nor do we have room for individual desks. However, if I had an extra room I think it would be a blast to have s chool room and have everything together.

My answe is a similar answer to this

ahngele wrote:We live in a townhome, and our living room and dining room is basically one L shaped (small) room. We do school here and it is an easy tranistion from the dining table to the couch. We do not have an extra room for a school room nor do we have room for individual desks. However, if I had an extra room I think it would be a blast to have s chool room and have everything together.

We have a town house with three rooms downstairs and one of those is a tiny bathroom.The books are on top of the piano -because the toddler can not get them from there.We pull down the books as we need tham and return them when we are done.If I had the space -I think a school room would be beautiful,but then we would still have a 2 year old playing in the room

We bought tubs for each child, and we also put 2 sets of basic school (and art) supplies in mobile storage containers (we used the Pampered Chef Tool Turnabout for each of them). If it's reading books together, we just grab the book and snuggle up on the couch for those. If they're reading books alone, they lay on the couch to do it. We used to rotate between the 2 tables we have (1 in the kitchen, and 1 in the dining room), but each of the boys ended up developing a "favorite" work area, and now they each stay at their respective locations to do their seatwork. Once my toddler starts watching Barney though, my ds moves from the dining room table to the kitchen room table, because he's too tempted to watch Barney that's playing next to the dining table in the living room. While he's doing his last independent work at the kitchen table, my youngest ds and I run upstairs to our bedroom and cuddle up to do his Emerging Reader's set and Storytime there together. Finally, he heads downstairs to the table to finish math, while my oldest ds runs up to the master bedroom to do my teacher portion with me there. I had not planned this, but he wanted to do it there after seeing Riley up there - he actually shared he was too tempted to tune into Barney otherwise, and said he liked doing math with me there.

One time, when I was teaching ps, I was taking a masters course that lasted 3 hours, and we did not leave the room. That is what prompted me to start adding movement to the day for the dc I taught. It drove me nuts to make it through that class. I realized that this could be the way dc felt too. It has helped me to add movement with a purpose to our day, and I've included it in our daily schedule so each ds knows how to move of their own accord. It sure has worked well for us, but every teacher is different. However you can feel close to one another, have supplies near at hand, and yet have enough movement to the day - that's the ticket to a happy day. We have a 100 year old house, and it's not that big, so as our dc grow especially, it's been a wonderful thing to move around and utilize all of the house we can. I've quit wanting a school room, and started thinking of our house as the school room - which has worked well for 3 busy boys.

In Christ,
Julie

We have our kitchen set up as our school area with a whiteboard, bookcase and all the things we need close by. All of our writing work is done at the table, but we do our reading from the couch or my bed. Sometimes I read storytime to them while they eat breakfast or lunch. We have a sectional couch in our living room and I like for them to all sit around me so they can see the pictures in our Bible stories, science & history lessons.

I have a chest that looks like a coffee table right next to the couch and that is where we do school. Inside the chest are three baskets. One is Bigger one is LHFHG and one is extra stuff. Near all that is a cabinet with all our bible stuff in it. So all that makes doing school from the couch perfect. We do all our read aloud there. Then I have a kitchen counter top desk in my kitchen and that is where the computer is and where I correct things like math. But sometimes I use the couch for that also. Are you getting the idea. I am really never running around for things because we have a place for it all. I have the kids look in the teacher manual and get all the books out of the chest for the day and then we are set and we do all our reading. Works perfect for us.

All that sounds so cozy! Maybe I just have too much stuff!!! Or maybe if I planned better.......mmmm...