Our school cabinet

I would love to have a separate school room with vast bookcases full of resources, maps on the walls, a large dry erase board, and separate areas for each of my kids to sit and do their work. We do have an unfinished basement, which we may be able to make use of in the future. Until then, we make do using the dining room table for seat work and hands on activities and the living room for reading.

Although it is always my intention to put away all of the school books and supplies before dinner, I must confess that last year there were quite a lot of days when centerpiece of our table was an assortment of school books, papers, pencils, and miscellaneous booklets. My DH's one request for the summer is that I find a way to better organize the school supplies so that the table is cleared for dinner (and not by moving stacks of books to the floor either). I didn't want the supplies just thrown in one big jumble in the kitchen cabinet so that we ended up with bent books and missing papers. Here is what it looks like:
Top left: Manipulative's - cuisenaire rods for math; pattern blocks, attribute blocks, and interlocking blocks for critical thinking, some pegs with which Benny plays on occasion.

Top right: Timeline notebooks for both girls, lapbook folder for each girl (geography and history), I also put my planning notebook and folders with check sheets, images for lapbooking, and our Bible curriculum.

Bottom left: 4 plastic letter trays stacked. On top are Benny's Kumon books and a pencil box with our math wrap-ups plus Benny's alphabet egg puzzles and number frogs. The next shelf has ziploc bags with Violet's completed history and geography booklets. Below that are two more ziploc bags with history and geography booklets for Jessie. On the bottom is our color card stock.

Bottom right: The 3 drawer plastic unit holds pencils and erasers in the top, dry erase markers (and the eraser when we find it again) in the middle, and scissors and glue sticks in the bottom. Above the drawer unit are Jessie's and Violet's memory boxes.

Jessie and Violet each have their own basket which holds all of their individual books which fit nicely into the remaining space in the bottom.


That's our cabinet with our current material. When Benny gets a little older we can expand into the other half of the cabinet, we just have to relocate the books on tape, the remaining play food, and a few miscellaneous books which I probably just need to go on and sell anyway.

Unused material is stored in boxes in my office closet, and I have a desk drawer for teacher's guides and catalogs. I think that's it other than the library books which have their own crate in the girl's room. It may be small, but I can find what I need and it's easier to clean up this year as well.