Homeschool environment

We homeschool in the living room with fold away tables. They slide under the crib for storage. Supplies and current books are in a tiny closet. There is a wall map in the dining area along with our current picture study. Not a fancy setup at all.

I guess I should mention that we no longer have any posters, timelines, etc. on the walls. Like Tecrz1 mentioned, I definitely want my home to look like a home and not like a school. We weren’t using the room that we turned into a schoolroom before. It had only one chair and an unused TV in it, so when someone gave us some vintage desks, we were so thankful that we actually had a place to put and USE them! A school room definitely is NOT a necessity, and we are trying this out to see if it works for us. If not, I have no problems reverting back to the dining table. Thankfully, both rooms are equal distances from the kitchen, so it’s still convenient for me to be back and forth between the kids and my responsibilities in the kitchen. I do LOVE our chalkboard. It’s from Ikea and was $14.99. I has a chalkboard on one side, a dry erase board on the other side, and there’s dowel rod going across the bottom for a roll of butcher paper. My kids LOVE it too! They use it more for art and drawing than for school, but we get lots of compliments on it because it is so quaint and cute. I painted it a cute apple green color, so it fits in the room whether or not we use it for school. We plan to move out of our current large home and into something MUCH smaller. I’m looking forward to not having as much floor space to keep clean, but I have been very thankful for this place!

We do all our family subjects in the living room on the couch.  We have 2 magazine holders with the current books we are using, on a bookcase in the living room.  There is a medium-sized leather basket with our scriptures in the same room.  And a pencil holder with pencils and pens.  

We have a separate room for our ‘school room’.  It is the smallest of the 3 bedrooms upstairs.  I put a 4 shelf metal shelving unit in the closet.  It holds a variety of things – white boards and markers (in a rectangular plastic container with lids), current math books and workbooks in magazine holders, spelling manuals and notebooks in magazine holders, math manipulatives (all in small to medium sized plastic containers with lids), a 3 drawer organizer with things like adult scissors, magnets, post-its, sharpies, etc. (my ‘teacher’ supply box) and much more.  The actual closet shelf holds bulky things like the math scales and some “extras” buckets.  One is filled with all sorts of glue, another with a variety of index cards, colored pencils, etc.  My ‘teacher box’ has one or two of each thing and then I store the extras elsewhere.  Also in the closet is a hanging organizer that has kid scissors, pencils, erasers, etc.

There is a rectangular desk with 5 chairs.  We do math and spelling there….and the littlest plays there.  There is a magnetic whiteboard on the wall behind it.  We have 1 long low bookcase and 1 3-shelf bookcase.  It holds activities, books, teacher manuals, etc.  The long low shelves also hold lidded plastic containers of markers, colored pencils, crayons, etc.  Other than that it’s a pretty bare, plain room.  I do plan on hanging a map of the world and one of the US.  The long shelves also hold a picture frame and easel with the artist study we’re working on.  I change the picture every week or two.  

Scattered throughout the house we have the rest of our books.  They are organized by topic.  All the ancient history books are in one bookcase (fiction and non-fiction).  All the American history together.  I use a smaller 4-shelf bookcase upstairs (in a spare bedroom) as my “holding shelf”.  For example, we’re studing modern American history right now (WWI and on).  I moved all those books upstairs into that shelf and then only bring out 1 or 2 to put in the living room, in the magazine holders.  When we’re done it goes back onto the smaller bookcase and will eventually go back downstairs when I need to put the Ancient history books there.  

I’ve never had the time, money, space or permission to do the fancy rooms.  (Lived in base housing most of our homeschool career)  I drool over them, but my reality is much simpler.

I agree with above coralloyd about the light.  I thought we would have our homeschool room in the basement.  It seemed perfect to me as it was where our extra space was, and we could set it up like a school room.  However, my daughter doesn’t want to do school there because it isn’t light enough.  She wants to look out the windows.  I have decided that for us it is better to have a place to store our school supplies, but plan on doing school wherever we feel like at the time (instead of a designated school room.)  One of the best things I have done is give each of my children their own box for their books and school stuff.  I just use those cardboard Banker boxes that have the handles on the sides.  They painted them in colors they like for fun.  I also have a box for myself. The boxes usually sit in the living room unless we are cleaning to get ready for company.  🙂  

We do have maps on the walls in the basement.  I also have a dry erase board that I like to use to explain math problems to them.  I just prop it up wherever I can and lean it against the wall when not in use.  I thought I would love having a wall timeline, but finally decided that the BOC idea is really better.  It takes a lot of extra work to keep the wall one up along with the BOC notebook and it wasn’t worth it to me.

I think fancy school rooms are over-rated.  Sometimes you just have to stop looking at all the lovely pictures that others have posted online.  So many times I have allowed it to steal my peace as I keep looking for the “perfect” thing.  Sometimes I wish people would post real life pictures instead of only the ones that show everything in perfect order.  🙂  I hope you will be encouraged to find a solution that will work for you and your kids.  

We also have a small house with very little space for too much of anything.  We school at the kitchen table, living room sofa, and if weather permits, the picnic table.  My biggest need is a place to put the laptop as it sits on the kitchen table around the clock which means dh always wants to check email during meals. It also means the table is piled high with school books and needs to be cleared off at least 3 times a day so we can prepare and eat meals.  If I were a brave woman I would move the boys back into one room and use the other for school purposes.  I’m not.  So instead I will be hanging the wall map in my younger son’s room so we can view it when needed, and storing most of the books we are currently using in a free standing cabinet in the living room.  Books not currently in use are going on the shelf in my bedroom.  I have two large white boards, but don’t really have a place for them.  I also have a great desk in the basement, but I really haven’t been able to use it since it was moved out of our bedroom when we made it smaller to add the 3rd bedroom.  I would love to set part of the basement up for a permanent schooling area, it would be so nice to be able to just leave a project that we’ve been working on to go do something different without having to clear everything away, but there isn’t a whole lot of light there and it’s rather gloomy.  My husband talks about adding a huge addition or building a new house next year, but the cost of that scares me.  We’re not rich, so I would definately have to keep working, and we don’t need lots of space so much as practical space/storage.