It has taken a couple months of researching, dreaming and building, but we are finally finished with our homeschooling space!
This playroom used to house a couch and a bookshelf (that I found 6 years ago on Craiglist for $200 and spent 22 hours painting it white!) containing all of our board games.
I knew I wanted to have all of our materials organized in one space so that I wouldn’t have to go running through the house to find this and that to complete an assignment. By moving the board games, it provided a large open space that I could fill with necessary materials.
Next up, the workspace. I give all of the glory to Erica Arndt of Confessions of a Homeschooler who graciously shared her IKEA “super-desk” idea on her blog, going so far as to provide a Room Tour. After a few measurements and negotiations with my husband I was off to IKEA to purchase the materials:
- four Alex Drawers
- two Linnmon Tabletops
- four Orfjall Child’s Desk Chairs
- 1-3 Adils table legs – we opted not to use table legs but instead the pegboard Erica mentions in her room tour video. We did this solely because our four young children and pet rabbit love crawling under the desk to play and the legs would get in the way!
My husband purchased four brackets from Home Depot to secure the two tabletops together.
And voila! I filled the game room space with bins of materials for each of the three grades (Pre-K, 1st and 3rd) I will be using to teach the first 15 weeks (I stored the materials for the remainder of the year in separate bins in a closet upstairs) and plopped a Classroom Craft Keeper in the middle of the desk for each access to frequently used items such as crayons, pencils and glue.
It will likely never look this put-together again, as they’ve already claimed it as another imaginative play-place but we are still glad to have it ready for learning in a few weeks!
