Simple Homeschool Organization Ideas: Our Homeschool Space!

This post shares some simple homeschool organization ideas, including how we store our books and curriculum, where we do our school, and how we organize our art supplies. Encouragement for homeschool moms that you don’t have to have a perfectly designed house in order to homeschool!

Let me preface this post by assuring you that you do not need a dedicated homeschool room. I would estimate that about 80% of our homeschooling is done either on the couch or at the dining room table, and I know many others families are the same! Simple is good and there’s no need to use up an entire room for “school” if your kids would actually rather just lie on the floor.

In fact, the more we can break away from the narrow view of traditional education that says “education can only happen when your child is quietly seated in a desk,” the more free we will be to truly see our children for the unique individuals that they are and then adapt their education to suit their needs, not a school board’s needs.

This adaptation might include hands-on learning, field trips, experiences, tossing out the textbooks in favor of reading aloud living books, letting your child move while they listen, letting them lie on the grass to do their math, or asking them what they want to learn about (and actually listening to their answer!).

Going back to the idea of a homeschool room: if you do happen to be blessed with a dedicated homeschool room, please also remember that it does not need to be expensive or stylish or Instagram-worthy. Yes, I do love a bit of beauty in my home, and I believe it is well worth our time to bring that into our family’s life – seeing as we are created in the image of a God who also delights in beauty – but there’s no need to break the bank in pursuit of some fancy style that happens to be “in” this year.

So, as you enjoy pictures, inspiration, and ideas (either here or elsewhere), please remember three important things:

1. You might not need to change anything. If your current setup is working great, don’t change it! It’s entirely possible to enjoy some pretty pictures, admire what others have done in their homes, and still be content with the way your own home is working for you and your children.
2. These things take time. I for one did not start out our very first year of homeschooling by buying up 200 amazing children’s books on science and history and building a massive bookcase to hold them all. All of our favorite homeschooling supplies have been slowly collected over our six and a half years of homeschooling, and many of them we have found used or second-hand rather than brand new.
3. Even just one tweak can help your home serve the family better. No need to overhaul everything! I love seeing ideas for homeschool rooms and how other families set up systems to make their days smoother, but it’s never a good idea to try to copy every single thing that you see in a post online. That Instagram designer’s life is much different than mine and mine is much different than yours, so what works for her won’t always work for me and vice versa. If you find even one small idea here that will make your homeschool just a little easier, I’d call that a success!

Factors to Consider in Your Homeschool Space

As you are creating, re-thinking, or simply evaluating your own homeschool spaces, here are a few questions to consider.

1. Does this room/space serve the actual children in my home? Is it appropriate for their current ages and abilities? For example, if I am reading aloud while a baby crawls and explores, are there age-appropriate toys for them to discover? Are breakables put out of reach so I don’t have to keep interrupting our reading to re-direct the baby? That vase of flowers on the coffee table might be lovely but if it’s a trial and temptation to my baby I might be better off putting it higher up until we’ve had some time to practice self-control.
2. Does everyone who wants a seat have a seat? Again, some might prefer the floor, but practicality and functionality needs to come first before aesthetics or else we won’t end up comfortable in our room, which then means we won’t use it – and that defeats the whole purpose.
3. Does your child do better with simple, minimal decor – or with lots of artistic inspiration? Are they distracted if there’s too much on the walls? I have one VERY distractable child who basically needs to be facing a blank wall when he is working on school things, so I need to make sure that we have some of these blank walls in places where he is comfortable working.

Simple Homeschool Organization: Our Current Space

In our current home we have a room off the kitchen that was probably meant to be a dining room, but we have decided to use it as a library and homeschooling space. This is not to say that we do all of our actual schooling in this room – as I stated above, we spend a lot of time at the couch and the kitchen table – but we do store almost all of our homeschool books and supplies here.

These giant IKEA Kallax bookshelves have been an amazing choice for the past four years, and we have filled them to the brim! We actually bought two of them and I love that they can fit so much, and also that the “shelves” (or cubbies) are small, because it’s easier to organize lots of different books and supplies. You can also buy the fabric bins that fit in them which is perfect for anything I don’t want visible.

How I use them: I mainly store currently-in-use curriculum in this room as well as non-fiction picture books, reference books, and early readers (organized by level). I designate one cubby for each child where we keep the books and materials they are using right now, and then organize other books on the remaining shelves. Extra curriculum that we’re not using this year is stored in the basement, and other types of books (fiction picture books, adult books) are stored in other rooms of the house.

Yes, we have a couch in this room – partially because we needed to put it somewhere (and it fit) and partially because at least half of our homeschool time consists of me sitting and reading out loud. I will often find a child snuggled up here reading – it’s the perfect (slightly quieter) room for anyone who wants to get away from the rest of the family.

Eventually I’d like to get a real table (aka not plastic) to put by this wall, but as I stated above, these things take time and sometimes functional is better than stylish. We’ve only been in this house for a month but already this table has been used for crafts and puzzles and drawing and writing practice and everything in between! In our previous house, our only table was the dining room table, and it feels like such a luxury to have another flat space that doesn’t have to be cleared off before every meal. Not quite life-changing, but close!

Of course you can make it work if you only have one table – as we did for years and years – but if you have kids who love to create, and you have the space for another one, it makes a huge difference. I will just add that this “craft table” will probably work best if it’s on the main floor and close to the rest of the family; as convenient as it would be to stick a table in the basement and call it a day, *most* kids will not enjoy being so far away from everyone else and it probably won’t end up being used.

On this little bit of wall I hung up these clipboards that have our older boys’ list of daily school work that they can do on their own; the idea with this is that they can take these to another room, work independently, and then bring it back to show me once they are finished.

This turntable by iDesign has been our marker/colored pencil storage for at least five years now and it is still going strong. Approximately once every other month I will go through and sharpen some pencils, check for dried out markers, and organize it by color (honestly, it’s a relaxing and satisfying little project), but about half of the time the writing utensils inside are less organized and more of a joyful chaos. Either way, organized or not, it works and it’s sturdy and we love it.

This over-the-door organizer is not actually in our homeschool room, but it is only a few steps away and has been a fantastic spot for our other craft supplies. I found ours on sale at Michaels several years back, but I’ve linked a similar one from Amazon here. These are all supplies that we use every single day, and it’s so good to have them easily accessible for anyone who wants to start a project! Which is almost everyone, every day.

Each child has a (well-loved and much-used) fabric bin where they can put their artwork and treasures and other bits of nature that I don’t want scattered all over my house. These fill up rather quickly and we have to sort through them and empty them every so often, but it’s still worked well as a place to keep their treasures when I don’t want them covering our table and counters.

Other Places Where We Homeschool

The music room, of course, for singing and practicing piano!

The couch and the dining room table…

And because education is a life and life happens everywhere, you could also count the kitchen where we cook and snack, the basement where we play and talk, and The Great Outdoors which teaches us more than any textbook ever could.

There you have our simple homeschool room and homeschool setup! It’s nothing too fancy or expensive, and we never did any sort of grand makeover or remodel (you probably don’t need to, either). We have slowly accumulated these books and materials over the past five years as we learn about ourselves and what works for us; because of that, this room is well-loved, well-used, and a place in our home where everyone likes to be.

What more can you ask?