weekend project #5

Now that the school year is winding down (even though we will still continue schoolwork over the summer) we have been working on making the classroom more cozy, functional, classroom-like...  Ben assembled this bookshelf for me and I have been busy classifying books,  organizing school supplies and age-appropriate manipulatives for each of the 3 kids.   My desk was full of things I wanted the kids to have access to, but b/c of lack of space it was impossible.  We found a cargo table that our neighbor left behind that we were using for R2 to play on and display daily items, but it was a mess.  My only disappointment with this project is that we did not do this sooner.
I still have a few more organizational things I want to work on, but I am happy with it for now.  I want to wait for our new curriculum and see how I will organize our day before I spend any more on tubs, shoe boxes etc.  I also need to make labels for the classroom side of the books.  I turned them around so the labels were visible from the living room side (top left pic is taken from front door).  It looked better than seeing mismatched books from my front door.  Next step is to teach R2 to separate his items back into his bins, he is by far the messiest of the 3.
The shelf really made the class area become a classroom and the first thing you see when you enter the front door is not the over-sized maps, but the room-divider/bookshelf.  And yes, we really do have that many books, and this is after 2 rounds of purging.