Homeschooling Without a Homeschool Room {Organization}

When I look at photos of beautiful homeschool rooms with wall to wall book shelves, gorgeous nature posters hanging in on-trend frames, and closets full of shelving, I do feel jealous. We just don’t have that kind of space. We don’t have a dedicated homeschool room. Now that my husband is working from home permanently (PERMANENTLY!) our home is feeling smaller than ever.

BUT, I’ve come to embrace integrating our homeschool with the flow of our home, out of necessity but truly it just mirrors the homeschooling life. All of life is schooling. We’re always learning– that includes at the dinner table, in the kids’ rooms, in the living room.

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And so, our “homeschool room” is really the 6 or so rooms of our home.

I’m not an interior designer and my photos aren’t instagram-worthy, but this is how we organize our homeschooling life!

Our three main homeschool spaces are the living room couch, the dining room floor, and the kitchen table:

We do SO MUCH schooling at our couch. I find that when we are cozy, we are connecting. And when hearts are connected, they’re open to learning. One of our greatest homeschooling purchases was a lift-top coffee table. We tuck away tons of homeschool supplies inside, and we work at the couch using the tabletop. On the bottom shelf area few “gameschool games” and others to pull from during downtime. Inside the table are our family-style curriculum (that everyone is part of– our family read aloud, geography, history, nature cards).

Although I’ve whined for several years about wanting to pull up my wall-to-wall carpets, they’ve really made it comfy for us to sit on the dining room floor. (Who installs white carpeting in their dining room?! Apparently pre-kid version of ME!) Aside from the couch, this is where the vast majority of our lessons are held. We have two small whiteboards tucked beside the cart. A folding bed-tray becomes a lap-desk for floor lessons (click on the option at that link that’s under $20! or look on your local buy nothing group!). We have a small rolling cart…. that never actually moves because there’s nowhere else for it.

I also have a small chest of drawers from Target that’s approximately 20 years old. These contain the majority of our current curriculum that aren’t in the coffee table (typically the one-on-one subjects and those with more pieces/manipulatives to them– math, spelling, reading. We use Right Start Math and it has a TON of manipulatives. I have the ones we pull from frequently in the basket on top of the chest of drawers and in baskets on our rolling cart. I have a math balance in my dining room sideboard next to serving platters and pots. lol. But it’s worth it for this program. We LOVE it! You can read my full and super thorough review here.).

The kitchen table is our third most used homeschooling area. We technically have an eat-in kitchen but it’s just barely! I was able to find ONE table that kind of sorta fits after searching allll the internets, and truly you cannot have two adults prepping food/loading the dishwasher while the chairs are occupied.

Anyhow, we make it work and use the kitchen table space with the addition of a cookbook easel, and propping things on the windowsill. This naturally leads to all sorts of “educational conversations.” I also tuck a book next to my knifeblock and grab it to read from if my kids are stilllllll eating when I’m finished (whyyyy do they eat so much????).

I’m grateful to have a storage closet in the basement that allows me to store games and books that aren’t in current rotation. Otherwise, books are found in baskets and bins throughout the house. We’ve been in this habit since the kids were tiny. Here’s my post about using a Short Books Basket with little ones.  SHHH… I also hide books in my bedroom closet for upcoming lessons, when I don’t want my kids previewing them and ruining the surprise factor.

Because we are such heavy users of the library, our home collection doesn’t need to be massive. (I have a post here about organizing our home library.) I do pay for a second library membership in a neighboring town so that we have greater access to titles we need, along with interlibrary loan and extra digital borrows (we use Hoopla Digital through the library for the majority of our audiobooks and pay for a “silver membership” to Audible, which is one book every other month. You can read about that in my post here, The Most Bang for Your Audible Credit). Interlibrary loan is hugely important to our homeschool as it allows us to get just about any book we need, with a bit of patience and planning. It takes a few weeks to come in, and the borrowing period is just 3 weeks– but it’s wonderful to have that available!

The oft-quoted Charlotte Mason phrase is so true: “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” This homeschooling life is so rich and I just love that we can learn seamlessly as part of our home!

I hope this was helpful to give you some organization ideas, and encourage you that you don’t need a fancy homeschool space to school at home! It works for our family… and of course your home shouldn’t look like mine! That’s the beauty of homeschool… individualization for every family. 🙂

Feel free to reach out if you have any homeschooling questions I could help with. I post lots of book ideas on my instagram, and I have a homeschool posts index page here.