Homeschool Room | Is it really necessary?

so today I am inviting you along for a tour of my school room come on along hi everyone and if you are new here I'm Pam Barnhill would you please hit the subscribe button are the little Bell to be notified every time we have videos go live we talk all about home school rooms home schooling home school or ghen ization and so much more here on the channel so today we are taking a look inside my school room but before I do that I wanted to kind of tell you a story of how we got to how our homeschool room is now and some of the different homeschool rooms we've had through the years because it is not vital that you have a home schooling room to be able to home-school so many home schoolers homeschool at the kitchen table they just need a place to keep a box of supplies or a closet of supplies so there's a lot of stuff that comes along with homeschooling having a place to put it it's really great but you really don't have to have a school room now if you go back about 10 years you couldn't have told me that that's something that I probably wouldn't have believed if you tried to tell me that because I really felt like I needed to have a school room and at that time we were closing in the garage of our house and to make a little extra space and I told my husband I would like to build a room out here that we could use as a school room and we did and we decorated it up really nice it was fabulous and it worked really well the first couple of years that we were using it when I had you know a four-year-old and a two-year-old and we were doing a little bit of preschool but then baby brother came along and all of a sudden I had a newborn and then I had a toddler who was moving about and it was a lot harder to stay contained within that room that kind of away from the heart of the house so this is the second point I want to make first point you don't have to have a school room second point is it may change with varying seasons of your life it's very possible that what works for you for a while may not work for you later on and then it may change back again so when we moved from that house and we got a new house we had an upstairs area in the house and I thought well this might make a pretty good school room except it didn't and the reason it didn't was because I had a two-year-old who kept wanting to go down the stairs and the stairs were made in such a way that you couldn't put a gate up the banisters were uneven so I couldn't do a gate and so it just never really worked as a school room because he kept trying to go up and down the stairs he never wanted to be up there with us and so he would come downstairs and I would have to follow him and so it wasn't working so for a while we moved the school room into our eat-in kitchen which worked pretty good except we always ate in the eat-in kitchen we never used our formal dining room so we had our school table in there we had a few little bookshelves and some baskets and bins and then finally I realized you know it would just make ever so much more sense if we took the formal dining room and turned it into a schoolroom now this meant I had to kind of get over the idea of having a formal dining room and I had to get over the fact that this was right inside the door of my house when people would walk in and so it was often a mess there were school things everywhere and it really just screamed we're home schoolers but I was okay with that at that point you know I had come to terms with the fact that we were home schoolers and anybody who came to see us would know that pretty quickly so that was probably one of the best things that I ever did and so I kind of get over it about being home schoolers and it was okay have the home-school stuff sitting out and sitting around it was just part of our lifestyle so we use that as our schoolroom for a number of years and then we decided that there were some things that we wanted and we were willing to move to get them now moving something that's absolutely no fun for anyone but we decided it was going to be worth it because we wanted a little more property and we wanted a place where the kids could get outside and play and run around more we were on a pretty busy street in town and so we wanted to try to change our circumstances a little bit and it became apparent in our search that we might have to give up the schoolroom in order to trade off for the things that we really wanted and we had reached a point where that had become okay for us it was more important for us to have a little more room to breathe and a safe place for the kids to play outside than it was for us to have a designated school area so we were talking with a builder and we were going to build a house and we were getting ready to go sign the papers on that house when we found the house that we actually live in and the house that we had decided to build it did not have a school room it did not have a formal dining room that we could turn into a school room basically we were going to have a school closet and I was going to be okay with that because that was the trade-off for the other things that we were getting that we really wanted so sometimes your school room can be a trade-off whether and you have to decide you know what is the priority of this well it ended up that we decided before we went and signed the contract that we were going to look one more time for what might be the perfect house for us and we found it and we put an offer on it that very day and that's this house and the beautiful thing about this house is and it has an office and that's kind of what I'm standing in now is what the realtor has and said was an office and it's right off the main part of the house so we don't have an eat-in kitchen which is fine but we do have a formal dining room and we do have this office area that we could use as a schoolroom so let me give you a little tour ok so we're going handheld here and I'll try to keep it from getting too shaky and also there's not a lot of light in this school room this room is actually facing the north side of the house and so it doesn't get a great deal of light now we do have lights up there in the top but and they haven't burned out yet when they burn out I'll probably ask my husband to replace them with brighter lights and some white light so it's not quite so yellow in there but one of the things I love about this particular room is it is right off a random dinosaur costume by the way right off the heart of the home everything is right here out in the open now this is good and it's bad and you can see we do have another table to eat on over there so that is fabulous this is good and this is bad because you know when it's a mess as it so often is because I had my kids clean it up today so I could show you this video it's right out here in the middle of everything so but I don't mind because I really love being where all the action is in the house so this particular table is the one that was in our old school room back in our other house and we actually made this table ourselves it comes it's made from pieces from Ikea and the pieces that we use to make it are not available anymore to purchase you'd have to get different pieces and some other people have done some different things I've had local home schoolers who have kind of made their own version of this table and they used cabinet underneath or drawers underneath and it's not tethered down in any way and so you can it does move you can lift it up you can see it's kind of askew there and it bothers some of us more than it bothers others of us but mostly I just go around and straighten it up sometimes whenever I need to and then we used to have rolling chairs from Ikea I got these really cute aqua chairs from Wayfarer but they are not comfortable and I have not been able to find cushions to fit those and so the kids complain often about the lack of comfort of the chairs but we're stuck with them for a while so there you go one of the great things about this particular space when we found it were the built in shelves like that's probably all kinds of Awesomeness there and so you can see they go almost all the way up to the ceiling and another great thing is right over here we have even more so I'm not sure who built this house or what their relationship with the books were but I just feel really grateful for it so over on the shelves we have on this end we have art supplies I'm trying to inspire some creativity and the kids by putting out just a lot of different art supplies and things that they have access to and they can use to create at any given time over on the school table and then this end is more books and things of that nature and you can see our morning basket is there in the middle on the shelf and we have some maps I like to use those black magazine holders down there to help me organize the thin picture books we don't have nearly as many of those as we used to have but and but they do kind of like keep things and keep things straight down there so lots of great places to keep art supplies and books so this is my end of the table down here and then Olivia sits on this side of the table and you can see there are some cubbies down there where she keeps all of her books and curriculum down there and then John and Thomas both have cubbies on the other side of the table now wonderful thing on this wall we have more storage and so we have the shelves up top these are all of my teacher reference books and my curriculum that we're using mostly this year there is some older curriculum we have the lovely charging station which always stays a huge mess and then my desk apprentice from Staples where I keep any copies that I've printed out where I keep the teachers guides that I use most often and need to have really handy those kinds of things and there's our computer workstation this is the kids computer which is out where everyone can see and then some posters we haven't hung up yet we've only been living here not quite a year so it's okay that we haven't hung some posters up yet and then on this end we have some of our subscription boxes and then that shelf right there is new I'm keeping reference materials on that shelf so the kids can get their reference materials whenever they need to and then some necessities like a printer and a pencil sharpener and then in the storage underneath we keep other years worth of curriculum in just other general school supplies and then I stuff a lot of things down there just to keep the room kind of tidy looking the back cabinet back there is absolutely full of different sizes and shapes of paper and paper holders the only complaint I have about the schoolroom and I'm gonna be honest I'm not going to complain much about it is the lack of wall space so you can see there's a little bit there I've got my prints from these small blessings over the top of the window and there's a little bit there but there's really no room to hang like a big map or anything and so I do kind of Miss that I will say my old school room didn't really have that either so you know we have to keep our Maps rolled up and then pull them out when we want to look at them and then this lazy susan in the middle now this is not a fancy craft project or anything it's really just buckets sitting on top of a lazy susan and so and if you spin it too fast they do fall over and things fall out and then kids have to pick them up and put them back in there but I would say that happens maybe three times a year the kids have learned pretty well not to spend that too quickly and there you have it so thanks so much for coming along on a little tour of our school room today if you have any questions about anything I showed you just ask them down in the comments and I will do my best to help you find things keep it in mind that it's been a few years since we put our homeschool room together and so some of these things are no longer available but did remember a homeschool room is not absolutely necessary for homeschooling your need for one is going to change depending on your season in life and the most important thing is that you enjoy living and learning together so be sure to hit the bell or subscribe for more homeschooling videos and we will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: Pam Barnhill

Views: 5,647

Rating: 4.9515152 out of 5

Keywords: homeschool, homeschooling, homeschool room, homeschool room tour, homeschool mom, homeschool curriculum, homeschool organization, room tour, homeschool room setup, classroom setup, homeschool room ideas, homeschool space, how to set up a homeschool room, how to set up a homeschool classroom, how to organize homeschool, homeschool room organization, pambarnhill, homeschool planning, ikea homeschool room, setting up homeschool room, homeschool dining room, homeschool tips

Id: kStGasporSI

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019