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Everyone needs a homeschool space to homeschool, right? And homeschooling in your living room can make your house messy! Very messy! Unless you have really good hiding places for everything. 🙂
Last year we spent time and money creating the most beautiful homeschool room downstairs. It was perfect! Super spacious and everything we wanted and needed was in it (noticed that wanted came before needed LOL). We only had one big problem. No one felt comfortable homeschooling downstairs. It just didn’t feel natural to us who were use to the dining room table and the living room sofa.
How we solved the homeschool space dilemma…
We little by little went back to homeschooling in our living room and dining room! Ha! Crazy, right? It didn’t take longer for us to start moving a whole bookcase upstairs and the rest came as our homeschool life happened daily.
Our beautiful homeschool room continues as a beautiful homeschool room storage! Everything we are not using at the moment is there, everything we are using at the moment is here where life happens most of the time in our home: the living room and dining room space!
Yesterday I share everything about how we organize our homeschool in our dining room and I know you will want to check it out! I shared 7 tricks to organize it well without making your dining room looks like a full classroom.
Here is how to organize your homeschool space in your living room without making it look like a disaster!
Welcome to my living room! At first, you won’t see anything much that shows we homeschool there. Well, except if you look very closely, especially under my coffee table. My walls are empty and I still don’t know what to add to it. I would love your suggestion! 😉 I guess this is for another blog post.
It looks so blah, right? I do need to decorate it! Here is my ADD kicking in! ADD stands for “Attention Decoration Disorder” as my beloved rebbetzin Bobbie would say.
So let me show you all the homeschool resources we have and use daily in this space!
Under this IKEA coffee table, I get to hide most of our arts and crafts resources, our learning boxes, games, books, etc! Eeek!! This is one of my favorite pieces of furniture. Perfect for anyone with children.
Over this coffee table my kids, color, paint, draw, do homeschool work, play board games, play beads, puzzles, etc. It’s hard to keep the surface clean as there is always tons of activities happening there.
My two favorite tools to organize any homeschool spaces.
- Clear plastic containers! The plastic containers you see under my coffee table are plastic shoe boxed from the dollar store! I use tons of shoe plastic containers to organize our homeschool supplies, especially downstairs in our homeschool room. You can label them and look through them to know exactly what is inside. They are inexpensive and you can find it in pretty much any size you need.
- Baskets! Oh boy! I am so obsessed with baskets! Baskets rock! Baskets can do a good job in hiding what you don’t want people to see. It makes your space looks pretty and organized even when inside the basket everything might be a disaster. Baskets are perfect for the tons of books we keep in our living room for reading aloud.
Here is how I use my favorite baskets in our living room – homeschool space.
Hiding behind the sofas on the back of my living room I have our big morning basket and my little one’s morning reading basket.
Our big morning basket holds pretty much all of our favorite read aloud for poetry tea time, art related books for art appreciation, biographies we are reading, devotional books, my treasured Ambleside Book of Verse, and even a few math manipulatives I use with the kids once in a while.
Here is a closer look.
This is the basket I reach out to when we cuddle in the sofa to read together. Even though I call it a morning basket, it is really a “anytime-you-want-to-cuddle-and-read-together” basket.
The white basket behind is for my special cuddling and reading time with my 4-year-old who is learning to read. She absolutely loves poetry and Mother Goose rhymes. She knows them all by heart. In this basket, I keep favorite read-aloud books like When We Were Young by A.A. Milne, The Children’s Book of Virtues, A Child’s Garden of Verses, her first set of Bob Books and her Beginning Steps to Reading Reader which we love!
Our homeschool space has also a reading basket for mommy!
On the other side of the sofa, I have my own morning basket. This is where I keep one of my Bibles, devotional books, my printed ebooks from Simply Charlotte Mason ( I so recommend them to any homeschool mom!), a notebook to write down my thoughts, my favorite book on discipline (uh uhh! Yes, I need it here too.) and my Choose Gratitude journal from Crystal Paine. I love writing in my Choose Gratitude journal especially on the days I don’t need to consult my discipline book! LOL
Step into the principal’s office!
No, you’re not in trouble. This is mom’s little corner where I can work while my children are doing their independent work or reading.
Let’s not look at all the cables on the floor, shall we?
Ok. Much better! Here is mom’s space.
This is my command center! From here I watch my kids working and I’m able to help them every time they need attention. I can also watch them playing outside while I work.
On my right, I keep all my planning and Bible journaling supplies! No kidding, I have a lot of goodies! Stamps, paints, tons of Illustrated Faith products and stickers galore. 😀
Talking about Illustrated Faith, take a look up on my shelf! Yep, that’s my stack of Illustrated Faith devotional kits and my stacks of books I’m reading or often turn to for direction or inspiration.
On my left, you can see my planners, lots of them! I really love Happy Planners. I love planners, journals, and binders.
This is it! I hope you enjoyed touring my living room and peeking into my homeschool organization tips. I would love to hear your feedback down in the comments. 🙂
If you liked this post, please share it with your friends! Let them know about our 10 Days of Homeschool Organization Ideas blog party.
If you missed yesterday’s post, please click here to read it.
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Your Turn: Do you homeschool in your living room?
Do you find challenging to keep it organized without looking like a classroom?
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I love all the bins. Everything in it’s place and a place for everything! Been homeschooling since 2018. So hard to stay organized! Thanks!
Hi Ana, soo thank you for this helpful stuff! I like IKEA furniture and organization essentials, so I will definitely try your tips. We have to homeschool at the moment because of quarantine. So creating space for the study is a hot topic for me nowadays. Stay well and healthy!
Where is your “desk” from for your “office”?
IKEA 🙂
Thank you for this post showing your lovely living room. We recently moved into a 3 bed parlour house with our 6 kids which means my husband and I have had to use the dining room as our bedroom, so we no longer have a dinning table. I use clipboards for my son to do his work on whilst sitting on the sofa (or in the car if I am driving). We also have cubed units in our living room that holds everybody’s reading books. However all our art supplies, exercise books, folders, resources ect are kept in our bedroom in a sideboard and shelved cupboard. Keeping our house looking like a home instead of a school is proving harder as our son gets older but sacrificing my bedroom for a few years is worth it if it means my son is happy and learning at his own pace with the help he needs instead of being bullied by other students and staff like he was when he was in school (our wonderful boy is autistic so needs to be taught in a different way to other children his age)
Hi! I wanted to repin this article for a client’s homeschool board but basically all I can see is the same picture over and over of a sweet little girl and text that says “Clean eating, why it matters.” I am wondering if you switched out the images or if this is just a glitch on my computer? Thank you in advance!
I’m so sorry. Apparently is a glitch on my side. I fixed the images for now and I will have my tech guy take a look at this issue. You’re good to share it now. 🙂
Awesome! Thank you, I can see the images now. Woohooo!
Great ideas!
Loved seeing your organization hacks for homeschooling in your living room. I’m having surgery Tuesday, December 12th, and I will be bedridden for 12 weeks then I’m having another surgery and will continue to be bedridden another 12 weeks. I’m trying to think of easy ways to organize our homeschool books, that I use often, close to my bed. I’m putting all of our other supplies and books in my closet, where I have a 9-cube shelf and a 3-shelf bookshelf. I’m convinced that we can be successful, even if I cannot get out of bed.
Lisa Joy Starr
Lisa, I pray you will have a fast recovery. I’ve homeschooled for weeks bedridden and made it work as much it was possible. The kids would just gather around my bed for reading aloud and other lessons.
Take good care of yourself. The beauty of homeschooling is the flexibility to deal with situations like this.
Blessings, Ana
I love your homeschool space Ana! It’s so cozy! We homeschool in our living room and kitchen, so functionality and aesthetics are so important. I think I need to get myself a principal’s office too! lol 😉
Thanks for sharing!
xoxo
I am excited about getting the kids into a routine and giving them some independence. We home-school all over too… but it is not organized and hubby doesn’t even want people over because it is so unorganized. This is an area I have to grow in.
Tiffany, people think I’m organized but really I just know how to hide my mess well! LOL Baskets all over the house work miracles. 😉
Hi! I loved both of your posts about organizing the living room and dining room. It gave me lots of ideas. I have one question. Where did you get the file holder on the wall that holds your Happy Planners
Kenya, this is from IKEA!! And it’s super cheap. I bought mine years ago and I love it. 🙂 Thank you do much for reading and liking the posts. I’m glad to hear it helped you. 😀
Thank you for letting us “peek” at your living room organization, Ana! We school in various places in our home, too!
You did a great job of sharing many ideas of how to make homeschooling work outside of a school room! 🙂
Thank you, friend!! It’s challenging to have your homeschool happening in your living room and not let the place look like a chaos! LOL