Moving the School Room Back Downstairs.

We had our open ceiling living room closed in last year to be abet a heating and cooling problem in the house.  It gave us a bonus room that we quickly turned into a school room.  We love that school room, but now that I am on bed rest, it isn't a very useful room.  There's nowhere I can sit comfortably or lay down.  Meanwhile our downstairs, which used to look like this 2 years ago,

is now a little bit more streamlined and a couch that was once upstairs is now down there.  

This couch is my preferred bed rest location.  Yesterday, I had the brilliant idea that school down here would be better.  I had already gotten the upstairs room ready for school before the call to bed rest.  I had my wonderful husband move many things downstairs and pointed out where I wanted everything, so now our school room looks like this:

 Couch from which I can do read alouds.  A little table for the kids to color at or do independent work.

A view of the other side of the room from the couch.

My desk at which I can sit on comfy office chair and help J-jo or Bear with lessons (I used to sit on one of their little chairs at their little table, but there is no way I can do that now).  Bookshelves, which we had added earlier in the year for art material and book storage, now house many school materials.  I moved all the books that were there back upstairs (I didn't - the kids did) to the shelves in the "school room."

A closer look at the shelves, for people who like details.

The art supplies.

 A close-up of the labels.

Our school books hidden in magazine files.  J-jo's "workboxes" in the middle - my teacher books are in there to find easily.  I give him a few choices, but he sits next to me at the black desk and we do four things together - math, writing of some sort, reading, and spelling (if I can ever get him to want to do All About Spelling).  It takes less than an hour and then he gets to go play the rest of the day or do some independent activities from another shelf.

Our shelf of manipulatives and Montessori math materials that we still use.  Everything else stayed upstairs in the other school room.

I will have my husband move a few of our Montessori things down so that J-jo could have something to do while I worked with Bear.  The geometric cabinet, a puzzle map of Europe, the binomial and trinomial cube...and those will go on the long Expedit that houses the art supplies.

Bear's work trays with our schedule posted next to it (I can't bend, so I have one next to me on my desk). I did try over and over to rotate this for you and it appears rotated until I add it to the post.  The chair is for her to pile her finished work.

And that's our school room for the year.  Wondering if maybe I should turn the upstairs school room into a nursery...


linked to the "Not" Back to School Blog Hop.