How to Organize your Homeschool Space
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Whether you are homeschooling for the first time or are a seasoned pro, organizing your homeschool space is the key to keeping your days going smoothly. These tricks will help you decide how to organize your homeschool space.
After homeschooling 6 kids for 8+ years, we’ve made a bunch of mistakes and learned a few things along the way. The times that homeschooling has been the smoothest are also the times when we’ve had a clear organizational system and stuck to a schedule.
Creating an Organized Homeschool Space
The first step to organizing your homeschool is deciding where your kids will work during the day.
There are so many options that work. We’ve tried everything from a dedicated homeschooling room to working at the kitchen table. The trick is finding a place where your kids can stay on task and have the space they need to get creative.
Many families choose not to have a dedicated homeschool space. If you go this route, be sure to have a dedicated homeschool storage space so you can easily find everything you need. This can be a closet, a bookshelf, or another place that works for your family.
We’ve chosen to have a dedicated homeschooling room this year. That does not mean we exclusively work in our homeschool room, but it does give us a home base to store our homeschool materials and work when we choose to.
My kids do best when they know what is expected of them. That’s why we start our day by filling out a Ready checklist. This tells my younger kids everything they need to do before we are ready to start school. Truthfully, even my teens appreciate this and they often ask for checklists during the day when they are feeling overwhelmed.
Go here to download a copy of our Ready Checklist or sign up below.
How to Organize your Homeschool Space
Homeschooling often comes with a lot of STUFF.
We are homeschooling 5 kids this year from grades 1-9th and there’s a lot of stuff everywhere. Having an effective organizational system really helps us use the material we have and keep our workspace clean.
Use your wall space for storage.
The space we are using is not huge so we have to take advantage of all available space in order to avoid it feeling clutter. My favorite way to do this is to take advantage of the wall space.
Use clipboards on the wall to store current work and art my kids want to display. This is so cheap and easy to do so I love using clipboards for wall storage.
Store books on the wall with a shelf from Wallniture. Their Denver floating shelves are the perfect way to get books off the floor and somewhere everyone can see them. We’ve been rotating through seasonal books and current read-aloud books on our shelves and I’ve noticed that we are reading a lot more. These were so easy to install and they add so much to our homeschool room.
Add dry erase organizers to the wall to keep your day running smoothly. This isn’t necessarily storage but it saves you from having paper to-do lists floating around and cluttering up working surfaces. We created this daily planner and printed it in poster size to helps us stay on task during the day.
Use paper organizers on the wall to store smaller homeschool books or papers. We have several wall organizers to help us keep track of the items we use frequently. It helps us save drawer space for other items and keeps desk surfaces uncluttered.
Create a home for everything
This is important no matter what space you are organizing but it is especially true when kids will be putting their own things away. Be sure that everything has a space and, whenever possible, label everything.
My kids each have a drawer for each subject so both of my twins have their own “math” drawer, “language arts” drawer, and “science” drawer. This makes it so easy for them to grab their binders or books when we are reading to work on a subject.
We store extra items like books, science kits, and teacher’s manuals on a bookshelf, with each bookshelf separated by subject.
Plan your week
We like to leave plenty of room to be flexible in our homeschool day but I do find that the week goes smoother if we have a rough plan.
At the beginning of the week, we go over our schedule, create a plan together about which school lessons and projects we want to do, and set goals.
I LOVE the Erin Condren teacher’s planner to help keep my homeschool day on track. It is so customizable and I have plenty of room to plan everything that I need to.
Use Rolling Carts to categorize supplies
These rolling carts you can find at The Container Store, Ikea, etc. are my absolute favorite. I use them for everything. I keep one next to my desk with all of my essential items so it only made sense to use them for homeschooling.
Our favorite use is creating an art cart.
We have tried keeping art supplies in one place but we tend to move around, depending on the project we are working on. Having all the art supplies in one place, visible for kids, and portable makes it so much easier for us to get creative. We included magnetic clips to hold art smocks and hold paintings as they dry.
I used This cart from The Container Store. They have some FANTASTIC ideas for using these as art carts. I grabbed some organizers I had on hand for ours but I love all of the clever ways they have to customize these art carts for homeschoolers so I’m sure ours will evolve over time.
Having an organized homeschool space helps everyone enjoy the homeschooling experience so much more. Having a few key homeschool routines and systems in place makes a huge difference in our day and is the difference between pulling my hair out and enjoying time spent learning with my children.
