Our Workbox Set Up Using Recycled Boxes

I got to set up workboxes for our homeschool just in time for the start of our kindergarten year. I didn't have any plastic boxes and husband doesn't want me spending any more money for a while (I've been on quite the shopping the past month getting ready for school!) so I used old shipping boxes I've been saving. They really came in handy!

I didn't want ugly boxes though so we decoupaged/glued magazine and old calendar pictures to the outside of three of them. I used a whole thing of stick glue and the mod podge was making the papers bubbly so I decided to just tape on construction paper to the remaining boxes.

I added a pocket to the front of each box by taping a small piece of construction paper on three sides that is just big enough for our cards to fit in. Instead of using numbered 1-12 cards I used 12 cards with a famous person from history on them. This gives the boxes a small added educational value.

To make the cards I used unlined index cards cut in half and glued a small picture of our famous people onto each card. The people I chose are: George Washington, Cleopatra, Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Anne Frank, Sitting Bull, Dante Alighieri, Albert Einstein, Moses, Hokusai, Confucius, and Martin Luther King Jr. I may add a few quick facts to the backs of them later.

When N is done with a box he moves the card over to a pocket chart I made in a similar way using a piece of cardstock as the background and construction paper pockets taped on. When all the people are on the chart our homeschooling for the day is finished.

I would like to cut the top flaps off of each box to make them go on and off the shelves easier, so that is something I still need to do. I may also label each of the pockets on the chart with the location of the homeland of each famous person so when N is done he has to put them each back in their "home".

Pictures of Our Homeschool Room for Our Kindergartener

We have an extra room in our house that we have set up as our homeschool area. Although we do homeschool stuff all throughout the house, this is where we do our crafts, activities, projects, etc. It has all of our stuff stored neatly (most of the time, anyway).

This is our calendar I bought at Michaels and number banners from the Dollar Store. (I'm a sucker for cute stuff to hang on the wall.)

This is directly below the calendar and numbers. The cardboard is a simple board game we made, the box is holding books we are reading for that unit, and the plastic bins hold a lot of stuff I couldn't find another place for.

Our bookshelf is stuffed full with everything except books (we keep those on our larger bookshelf in the living room). We have flash cards, papers, and a few other odds and ends on the top shelf. The middle shelf holds most our supplies which our being held in glass/plastic jars we recycled by taping paper on them that we decorated. The lego container holds all of our scrap papers in a tidy spot. The bottom shelf is our puzzles.

This is our word tree we are using for learning Japanese kanji. Each week we add a leaf with a new kanji on it and "grow" our tree. This picture was taken right after we set up the tree, before we had added any leaves. This is the tree we bought, it was $12. Below is the first leaf we put on the tree. The kanji is "nani" which means "what".



One of our son's holiday presents was a 6 foot tall standing Abraham Lincoln poster. It greets us right as we walk into the homeschool room. Our first homeschool unit was a unit on America and ever since Abraham Lincoln has been one of his favorite topics to learn about so this was a nice surprise for him.

This is a view of the back wall of our homeschool room. It has an art desk that is hardly ever used (it mostly just holds stuff we have already done, as you can see). We usually sit at our long coffee table to do crafts or anything else because it's larger and has much more working room. You can also catch a glimpse of my recliner that I sit in while he's busy doing crafts or other things that don't need my assistance. The ABC poster was bought at the Dollar Store.

This is the view from the doorway of our homeschool room. Lincoln's poster is to the left just as you walk in, and the coffee table is what we use as our main work space.

I hope you enjoyed looking through our homeschool room!