The uses of a school room

Ah, a school room. How I have longed for one! Back in Brazil when our tiny little house was bursting at the seams with all of our books, I dreamed of adding on a school room! Just the idea of having the books in a place where they could stay during meals instead of having to move them around so often in the day whenever the table was needed for something else. And even better, a place where we could close the doors so whenever company came over the complete book chaos is not the first thing they would see as they walked in the door! I really thought I could have used a school room in the US when we stayed with Jamie, simply because of the amount of our books and the lack of space to keep them in. I felt bad that our books exploded all over her house, even though Jamie didn't care.

Well, at the lake we did have a place where we could do school, but it was not a place that we could keep our books, so every morning we would pack up our books and haul them over to the school room and do school there, and at the end of the day we would haul them back home. It did have its advantages...being away from the house made me focus more on school and less on things like laundry (ok, I didn't have a washing machine so I wasn't going to focus on laundry anyways) or other chores. the downside is, of course, that those chores need to be finished sometime and if they didn't get done during the day, they certaintly weren't getting done in the evening (when the lizards started falling from the ceilings...).

So, now I have a fun school room right inside the house! Hopefully soon it will have bookshelves in it so we can put all of our books in their proper place. We put a few desks in there (I did recently haul one of them out to the livingroom to do my puzzles on...) and put fun stuff on the walls (like the list of prepositions and all of the presidents of the US in order).

My question is this...why do I do school in the living room or the diningroom? Why do I give spelling words as I stand over the stove stiring the cooking pasta noodles? I guess having school at home is not the same thing as having a school in your home. I have never tried to copy a school setting so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we don't really fit into the mold that uses one.

I love my school room but have found that I don't use it as much as I thought I would. We like snuggling up and reading on the couch...desks keep us so far from each other; it is hard for the kids to read over my shoulder if they can't lay across the back of the couch while I am sitting there reading. We find it is easier to do math and workbooks when we can all sit around and spread our papers and books on the diningroom table. I keep the seat next to me open for somebody with questions. I do love having the spot to keep all of my school books, though. And we usually try to haul the days supply of books from the livingroom back to the school room at least once every day.

Oh, and one more thing! We heard through the grapevine that there is a used bookstore in the city and the other day Joel took the big kids to check it out. Those of you who have seen my children in the library can picture what the bookstore looked like after they arrived. I guess that the owners (an older man and woman) were so pleased to see children enjoying books in their store...in all the years since they have opened it they were the first children to come and shop there and to sit (lay) around on the floor reading the books (which I guess was a good thing...at least it made a few people smile).