Our New Learning Space {NBTS}

This post comes with a WARNING.  You do NOT need a personal library to home educate, although it does seem to be a common side effect in many home educating family homes.  Paul indulges my Bibliomania habit and my Dad custom built some bookshelves to make storage easier.  I think that I would have had a lot of books even if I had not home educated.  Home education has simply empowered me to find excellent twaddle-free literature.

A few years back I did a show and tell post about our learning spaces.  We tend to homeschool using our whole home. Nothing had really changed over the last three years. This years Aussie Not back to school party Learing Spaces theme over at Our World Wide Classroom has inspired me to change things up a little at home and move my primary learning area into the same space that most of the books are kept.

We found a great couch at the local op-shop and that is at the rear of the room.  I moved the small shelf next to this courch.  I keep our current read-alouds here along with a few reference materials and a couple of items that are to tall for any of the other shelves in the house.  The beautiful flowers are a gift from my daughter before she flew out to the USA two weeks ago.

I spent a few weeks rearranging my shelves and removing books I know I will not be using with Nathaniel and making some new sections.  I wrestled with how to arrange the books on the shelves which took a while.

If you're anything like me you'll want to get in there for a closer look at what sorts of books are housed on the shelves.

I finally took the plunge after 10 years of home educating and used the colour stickers on the Sonlight Core books to keep the different cores together. I am pleased that I finally did do this as it's made life so much easier.  It's so much easier to locate a specific book in a specific core. I can now see at a glance if a book is in the wrong place too.

I decided to try and place the biography style books together. Some of these are specifically for homeschooling and some of them are for me.

I also rediscovered my character study resources and will be adding these to our studies later this year.

One of my current passions is learning about the Charlotte Mason method of home educating.  The more I've looked into it the more I found out about Nature Journaling and journals, so over the last couple of years I have been collecting some resources for it.

Earlier this term I attended a Charlotte Mason workshop where classical subjects were talked about so I decided to place my Charles Dickens reources, William Shakespeare, Hymn Study, Artist and Composer Studies resoruces together.

Other posts in this years Not Back to School blog hop

• Meet the Family
• Year 4 Curriculum
• A Day in Our Lives

It's been so much fun rediscovering the treasures that have been hiding on my bookshelves and knowing they are in full view so I remember to use them when we're studying.  I am looking forward to a little more tweaking of this space but so far I am very pleased with the results.

Have you blogged about your homeschool space ?  If so I would love to come and see so please leave a link either in the linky or in the comments.

Blessings

Chareen
PS If my spelling is not a 100% this week I would ask for your patience. I am borrowing a friends laptop (who happens to be german) and so I have no way to do any spell checking as her pc has a default setting of German ...