I think.

I’m happy with it right now.  I have clean floors, all the books are on the shelves, and they’ve been sorted and gone through.    I threw out a huge stack of workbooks that were completely gone through, yet I was hanging onto for… hmm, don’t know.  But they’re gone now and in the recycling bin.

I managed to group like books together too!  So all the reference books are together, the science books, the history books, and my teacher manuals/answer guides.  It looks so much nicer!

Then I also went through all the craft supplies, sorted, tossed a lot, and then managed to find a home for every single supply.  The drawers have been labeled even!

Those pretty wicker baskets full of garbage? Yup! I sorted through those and found maybe six pieces of paper worth keeping.  Then I slid them back on the shelf and what do you know! They’re perfect for library books!  Next to Abigail’s library basket I also put her American Girl and Sisters In Time books.  Zander’s library basket is next to the poetry and history books.

Overall, now all the books fit neatly on the shelves, and there is even some room to spare- which is great for adding more in the near future!   The only thing I didn’t do, and should be an easy fix, is I’d like to get the magazine holders that hold the kids magazines down at their level.  That way they can go through them whenever they want- and not just when it’s suggested to them.

It’s amazing how it really didn’t take me that much time to get this done.  Three hours tops- and that is with sorting through scads of paperwork.  I’m glad I decided to do it this week, instead of next week when we’re back to school!

The School Room, that is.

The school room has become a victim of being the dumping grounds.  Not only that, but there really isn’t a rhyme or reason to the organization, or lack thereof.

So in an effort to force myself to tackle this all-important room.  I’m posting pictures, and hopefully, this will force myself to get to work and straighten things up.

Here is the bulk of the disaster.  I have all these wonderful shelves and organizing drawers, and everything’s just kind of chucked in there.  The wicker baskets in the middle literally hold garbage. Great, huh?

The plastic drawer thingys hold craft supplies, but they are certainly not organized in the least.  Markers and pencils are everywhere, as is a myriad of other minor craft items.  Sorting here is a must- and maybe, just maybe, I’ll pick up some new label tape for our label-maker and label the drawers with what they actually hold.

The bookshelves are another story, and I need to come up with a plan.  The school books share space with my cookbooks- and that’s not really going to change, but I can move some of the cookbooks to another shelf in the house that holds them.  With any luck, I can clear a whole extra shelf. Why?  So that I can actually put these books on the shelf instead of just stacking them on the floor:

Are you rolling your eyes too?   While I’m really loving having a table in this room and using it for school, the table itself is just a tad too big, and it’s also our outdoor picnic table.  Which means, once it gets nice out again, it will go back out to the screen porch, and then where will we be?    So I am going to be trolling a few places looking for ideas, so that I can have Andy actually build us the perfect size worktable-slash-bookshelf for the school room.

I’m also going through the books one by one.  I have quite a few things that have been given to me by various people since we started homeschooling that I’ve kept, because you just never know when a particular book is going to come in handy.  Yeah, right.  A year-and-a-half in, we have a groove, we know what we’re doing, and I even have a loose in-my-head plan for the next three years.  I must purge and pass on what we’re not going to use.

Think I can do all this?  I’m going to try.  And then I’m going to sit down and plan out the next few weeks of actual schooling.  We start back up on Monday and we’re going to hit the books hard for a few weeks.  Wish me luck!