Back to school...

Here's a great post from Aby Garvey, at Simplify 101 on creating an area in the house just for homework.

She took a lovely old cabinet, put it in the kitchen and converted it into "homework central".  Some of her great tips are below:

Equip your homework station with essential supplies. Use your storage space to keep basic supplies on hand. If you aren’t sure what supplies your kids might need for their homework, ask their teacher, or use the list below for starters. Then, add to your supplies as the year progresses. Our current homework supplies include:

- pencils and erasers
- pencil sharpener
- paper – lined, colored, plain white, and over-sized
- crayons
- glue and glue stick
- markers
- pens
- ruler
- dictionary and thesaurus
- calculator
- protractor
- highlighters
- a dry erase board and markers (for working out math problems)
- colored pencils

Declutter to make space for your homework station.Our homework cabinet previously contained just craft supplies. So to make room for new homework related items we started by decluttering and whittling down the craft supplies to just the essentials. The Play-Doh collection, for example, was scaled back to just two small containers. And Kailea decided it was time to part with some stencils and other never used craft supplies. We also moved rarely used craft items into a storage area in the basement.

Use containers to corral like items together and create a space that's fun.Most of the tools and supplies in the homework cabinet are stored in containers that make the supplies easy to see, access and put away. Plastic drawer units hold pencils, glue, crayons, markers and other small items. Small ceramic pots from IKEA hold chalk, pens and sharpened pencils. A plastic shoe box holds beading supplies, while an ITSO bin corrals a small stash of Kailea’s scrapbooking supplies.