The Strike of School Material Spread

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I am quite convinced that having a nicely decorated, neat house is something I will not have so long as we are homeschooling the boys.  Assuming we homeschool the lot through high school, I’m looking at another 18 years of semi-maintained chaos.

It isn’t that I don’t want a neat and orderly home.  It just seems to be something that is out of reach when there are other things that need my attention.  So, aside from those mad dash cleaning sprees when people are coming over, the house wears a somewhat disheveled appearance.

This brings up to the week’s question for the TOS Blog Cruise…

Do you separate your school area from your home area? How do you keep from having your school materials from spreading out all over your home.

Now, in this LARGE house we own, there is a HUGE room downstairs that has been purposed for school and play.  The idea is to do almost all of our school in that room.  No one need be in touching range of a brother, although I can’t make them invisible or inaudible like one boy would like.  And, in my ideal world, there would be safe play areas for J to entertain himself as I work with his brothers.

Sadly, the spread has happened….

Books or materials are in practically every room of the house.

In my defense, I can say that while Mr. O is doing renovations on the downstairs bathroom, we had to move most of our school time into the living space upstairs.  The new and old vanities are sitting in the big room and there are little pieces and parts too enticing for little ones.  My absence from the downstairs on a regular basis has led to boys’ messes exploding throughout the rooms.  Any parent knows that once it gets real messy, the idea of cleaning it up is too mind boggling for any child to even consider tackling, no matter what threat a parental unit might issue!

So, mom’s crate is now sitting on the kitchen floor holding most of the materials I need.  The boys haven’t corralled their materials into their crates. Instead, they are shuttling their materials around the house as needed while their crates remain downstairs.  With just a few more weeks of the ‘official’ school year left, I doubt I will bother pushing for that to happen.  Instead, I’m going to be happy if we can keep progressing and have our final grades and work samples turned into the charter school by the 15th due date.  (It should be interesting given we have one fully functional computer and the almost dead desktop won’t print a single thing for me.)

I’ve share a bit about the big school room before, which you can see in the post: A Peek Inside Our Schoolroom. 

My goal for the summer is to grab the run away chaos by the horns and get it together before the next school year starts in earnest.  I’ll be dreaming of everything in it’s place.  Maybe there will be some new shelves to hold the books and some books will be making an exit from the house.  Pieces and parts of items just tossed into boxes by boys when they ‘cleaned’ will find their proper homes as well…or they’ll be visiting the dump.  As much as I want to avoid creating a ‘school at home’ environment, I’m starting to think there is definite merit to the neat and orderly classrooms across the nation.  It’s far easier to learn and become creative if you aren’t constantly distracted by clutter.

Come tomorrow morning, you can read what other TOS Crewmates are saying on this topic.