Today is the day everyone loves to see, right? We all love peering into other homeschool rooms and setups to get tips and inspiration on how we can organize our homeschool space. I know I could watch videos and read posts about homeschool rooms all day long. So, today I am going to give you a glimpse into our homeschool room and show you how I have things organized for now. This is an ever changing process, as I am sure you know, but this is what is working for us right now.
For an updated tour, see this Homeschool Room Tour for 2020
Before I show you, I want to say that you do not need to have a homeschool room in order to homeschool successfully. You can homeschool anywhere you want, even outside the home! Right now, we are blessed to have a homeschool room, but we have spent many years homeschooling from our kitchen tables and couches. You find what works for your home and your family and do the best you can with the space you are given.
Most of our homeschooling is done in our designated room, but we do things like Morning Time and some reading in the living room so we can snuggle on couches. If my older children want to use their desks in their rooms, that is fine by me as well. We make sure to do any projects in our homeschool room and our table shows it!
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Whether you have a designated homeschool room or are schooling at a kitchen table, there are a few things to keep in mind about organization…
- You’ll want to determine a place for all of your homeschool supplies and curriculum.
Have a place for all of your books and curriculum. Right now we have bookshelves in our schoolroom, but I have used crates in the past. Each of my children had a crate to house their school books and notebooks and it worked out well. They could pull them out when needed and stack them when school was finished.
You will also want to organize your school supplies. You could have small bins or drawers or pencil boxes. Just find a space for your teacher supplies and your student supplies. I prefer to keep my teacher supplies in my desk so all the crayons and glue sticks don’t get used in our first month of school!
I have also found that labeling is very helpful, no matter the age of the students. When we children were all very young, I had picture stickers on our bins and now I have just written them out. This way, everyone knows where the pencils belong and where the math manipulatives go, etc.
- Your children will need a work area.
This may seem obvious, but each child will need a work area. It can be a desk or table or seat on the floor, but it is helpful for your child to have a place to call their own.
THE TOUR:
Ok, now I am going to show you our homeschool room! Keep in mind, our room is nothing fancy, but it works for our family. I have not bought any new furniture in years! Most of what we own and use has been through multiple children and has served us well.
IF YOU WOULD RATHER WATCH A TOUR, CLICK THE VIDEO BELOW!
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The first few pictures show you an overview our our school room. Our schoolroom is next to our living room and the door you see here is a bathroom. Our very well loved table is in the center of the school room.
This is from the other side of the room. On the wall we have our state map and some posters, and the calendar area underneath along with my first grader’s All About Spelling board.
That door with the heart is our living room. On the wall to the right, we have a bookshelf with magazine racks and our paint supplies.
This unit is from Ikea and houses most of our homeschool supplies. I keep binders on the top shelf and bins full of supplies. Oddly enough, they aren’t labeled here, but we keep art supplies, school supplies, folders, paper, flash cards, calendar printables, tangrams, the prize box, and more here. Our Sonlight guides are on the bottom shelf as well. I usually go through and organize this each weekend, since it is kind of the hub of our school room.
These pictures above show you the top and bottom of the Ikea unit. I keep anything I use on a daily basis on the top. I have a stack of books we use every day and my laminator and our calendar printables and my preschooler’s Daily Learning Notebook. The picture on the right shows small mesh bins where we keep playdough, small manipulatives for my preschooler, and the Handwriting Without Tears wooden pieces. The books are ones we use pretty regularly or ones I want to keep within reach for all my children. You’ll see Life of Fred books, First Language Lessons, Handbook of Nature Study, D’Aulaire books we will use for history, and some Usborne science books.
This shelving unit below houses all of our Institute for Excellence in Writing and our Sonlight Curriculum. It is organized so all the Writing is on the top shelf, the next shelf has my eight grader’s Algebra and American History, the next shelf is Literature and Bible, and the bottom shelf has Math U See blocks and Science supplies. On the very top of the shelf, I have my first grader’s All About Spelling cards and our memory verse cards.
This is our school supply caddy, kept on the school table. I believe the blue bin was from the dollar store and I just used glass jars we had to house the supplies. I used to give each child their own pencil box, but I have been trying this out and I like the way it is working. We keep pencils, dry erase markers, glue sticks, scissors, colored pencils, and sharpeners here. Excuse the kitten, she refused to budge!
This picture shows the magazine racks we have for each child. I do have four students this year, but my son’s holder is black and he didn’t think it looked good in the picture! I use these as our “workboxes.” Each child has one and this is where they keep most of their work. Their math workbooks fit in here, along with a few other workbooks. They each have a folder for Morning Time and a folder for their Daily Work. I put any work they need to complete in the folder each morning and they turn it in to me for any correcting at the end of the school day. It is working quite well! They aren’t pictured here, but I also hang each child’s Weekly Schedule on the wall here. They use a dry erase marker to check off each subject as the complete it.
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That’s about it for our homeschool room tour! I hope you found something that inspired you or encouraged you. If you want to know any more about something I mentioned in particular, please let me know in the comments and I will do my best to share anything I can! I will be going into more detail about what each child is using for curriculum and how we do Morning Time and Work Folders on my YouTube channel, so be sure and subscribe there so you don’t miss those!
This is part of a 10 Days of Homeschool Planning series, so be sure and check out each post!
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10 days of homeschool planninghomeschoolhomeschool roomorganizationplanningSonlight
