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Today I want to show you how to organize your homeschool in your dining room without having your dining room looking like a full classroom! Tomorrow I will show you how I organized our homeschool resources in our living room. So don’t miss part 2 of this blog post!
You can organize your homeschool space anywhere with these 7 tricks I’m sharing with you today.
Welcome to our home and to our homeschool space, after all, our HOMEschool happens where life happens the most in our home daily, in our living space!
I will start showing you how we organize our homeschool resources around our dining room table because this is where we spend most of our learning time.
Here are my best tricks to organize your homeschool room without looking ugly!
This is not the best picture quality but it gives a good idea of how our dining room looks like even though we have an IKEA Kallax packed with homeschool books in it. I wanted to make sure I had a nice map and plenty of blackboards and whiteboards to work with without making this space look bad.
1 – Organize your homeschool space with beautiful boards!
So here are the solutions I found: use beautiful black or whiteboards you can put away if you need to!
I found this gorgeous blackboard at Michaels and I was so blessed to buy two for the price of one in one of their BOGO’s sale! I love them! Note that none of my boards are fixed on the wall. I can simply put them away in our entrance closet if I need to.
I use one to write the memory verse we are learning to memorize for the week, and the second one to write the habit from Laying Down The Rails we’ve been working on along with a short poem we are memorizing.
I love my boards but let’s talk about the map on the wall! I love our map! This is a peel and stick map I bought on Amazon and stuck over a frame I bought at Michaels for $19 bucks. I stuck the map over the glass, did not even bother doing anything else to it. This map is also a “write on it” with dry-erase markers, it is perfect for our homeschool space!
Below our map, you can see a large whiteboard tucked in on the side of our IKEA Kallax. I take it out when I need, use it, clean it and put it away when I’m done.
Now I have to show you this board on your left!
I was looking for something specifically for our All About Spelling letter tiles. Again, this is our dining room and I don’t want to look exactly like a classroom so I wanted some pretty, stylish and easy to put away when we are not using it. That’s when I found this magnetic board at Michaels for only $11! The middle was not a blackboard so I bought the chalkboard paint and painted it. Look how perfect this is!
Now enough with the boards. Let’s take a look at what I have in this bookcase!
2 – Organize your homeschool space with a nice bookcase!
Top right is where I keep all my kid’s readers for our curriculum. I keep only what I am using this year for our homeschool upstairs is in this bookcase. Everything else we are not using stays in our formal homeschool room downstairs. Yes, we have a nice homeschool room we only use as storage! LOL
What this bookcase holds:
- kids binders and workbooks
- readers & books
- Sonlight instruction guides & teacher manuals
- educational games like our favorite game: uKloo Treasure Hunt Game!
- geography puzzles
- office supplies
- science experiment supplies
- All About Spelling flashcards box
- pencils, pens, colored pencils
& markers
- scissors, glues, clips, etc
3 – Organize your homeschool room with baskets, boxes, and Mason jars!
Here is a peek inside the two IKEA white baskets.
And here is a closer look at our books.
Now let me show you my two favorite things over the bookcase! 🙂
- (LEFT) I bring this wooden basket to the table every morning and keep it in the center so the kids have access to their pens, pencils, and markers easily. I bought this wooden basket at Michaels on sale for $8! You can find gorgeous ones here. And look how pretty these Mason jars look! You can even find beautiful colorful Mason jars on Amazon for sale.
- (RIGHT) This Revolving Desktop Carousel Organizer is amazing! Worth every penny. I waited until it was on sale to buy it using a coupon as well! Double blessing! 😀
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4 – Use every bit of space to organize your homeschool well!
Well, let’s now jump to the other side of our dining room where there is more to see!
We keep this desktop computer exclusively for the kids’ homeschool online lessons. This is where they do their CTC Math online lessons, French and Spanish online courses from PetraLingua, Piano Wizard Academy, our InquisiKids Discover & Do Science DVDs, watch Jelly Telly, read books on Epic and more! Sometimes they also use the iPads or Kindle Fire for these too.
5 – Organize your homeschool with workboxes!
Besides our computer desk, I keep my workbox system! Check out Kristi Clover’s Ultimate Homeschool Organization eCourse and Amy Michael’s Thrive Homeschooling Academy to learn more about workboxes.
This is how I’ve been using it for the past 2 years and love it. It is very simple. I only have one workbox for all 3 kids and I divided my drawers by subjects. I follow the same order we use in our homeschool routine for our Sonlight Core, then Language Arts.
We’re finishing Core B with a 1st grader and a 2nd grader, and I have a kindergartener starting Core P4/5 soon. You can check out our full kindergarten curriculum here.
So from top to bottom here is our workbox organization :
1 – Bible
2 – Read aloud books we are reading at the moment
3 – History & Geography we are reading this week
4 – Science
5 – B’s Language Arts 2 + readers he is currently reading
6 – H’s Language Arts 1 + readers she is currently reading
7 – All About Spelling 1
8 – All About Spelling 2
9 – Ariella’s ABCs
10 – Ariella’s 123s.
As you noticed, there are no Math drawers in our workbox because we do CTC Math online, so we have no Math books! Halleluyah!
6 – Organize your homeschool using not so obvious spaces in your room to store key resources!
And finally, my small white hidden bookcase under our breakfast bar!
This is a small bookcase but if fits perfectly hid in this corner. I store some extra books and resources we use for notebooking and lapbooking, our digital programs like Petra Lingua and Piano Wizard, our Little Passport little luggage filled with geography lessons from all over the world, some DVDs including Times Tales and our Cardboard VR!
7 – Organize your homeschool with binders!
I have binders galore in our homeschool space. They are fabulous to keep your resources and lessons organized. Each child has their own binder. All their Sonlight curriculum are in binders as well organized by weeks. Every week I transfer their weekly lessons to their binders so they know exactly what to do for that week, and I organized the lessons by day from Monday to Friday. Once the lesson is completed I transfer it to another binder to be stored.
I also love using binders for my own homeschool organization and sanity! I keep my Homeschool Mom Life Binder and my The Organized Homeschool Life book I printed and keep as a binder always handy.
Well, this is it!
Check out our homeschool in action here!
LIVE on #Periscope: Good morning friends! New blog party started today! 10 Days of #homeschool #organization #homes… https://t.co/62kE4edSqx
— They Call Me Blessed (@AnaWillis) August 22, 2016
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I hope you had enjoyed touring my dining room and peeking into every detail of how I organized my homeschool in our dining room. This is only part 1 of this blog post. Next, check out how I organized our homeschool in our living room and you will even peek at the principal’s office!
Also, check out the other posts in this series.
Your turn: Are you homeschooling in your dining room area?
How are you organizing your space? I love love to hear your ideas on how to organize your homeschool space in your dining/living room!
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I LOVE some of these ideas. Our Living/Dining is pretty tight and already packed. BUT I do believe I could actually pair down if I used the bookcase idea instead of our drawer system that looks messy because none of the drawers actually match each other. One is blue, one is see through plastic…. you get the idea…… AND I need to get MY things out of the dining room and into the bedroom/office. I use a plain ole black presentation board for our blackboard. it works great…is plenty big enuf and can be stored between the china hutch and wall, although it usually stays hanging on the wall. I also have our map laminated so I can write on it, in a frame hanging so it can be seen from the table. We use it SO much all the time that I never feel the need to put it away. 🙂 Thank you for your idea! <3
That’s great Cora!! I’m glad you liked my organization tips. It takes time to put things in the right place and find an organization system that works for you and your family, but when you do find it then everything works smoothly! Have you joined us on Facebook yet? https://www.facebook.com/theycallmeblessedblog/
What terrific tips, Ana! I geek out over everything organizing – especially when it comes to homeschooling. It just saves us all so much stress to have things where we can quickly find and use them. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks, Amy!! It took us quite a while to feel organized. We first created the homeschool room to have everything organized in one place but we didn’t like to homeschool in the homeschool room. LOL SO slowly I had to find a way to organize things around our living space and now I am happy and comfortable with things where they are – finally!
I love your map and chalkboards!
Thanks, Alison!! I love them too. I still can’t believe I got those chalkboards on a BOGO sale! 🙂
Great ideas! I’ll have to incorporate a few in our dining room. Thats definitely the best space for our homeschooling.
Hey, Camie! I’m glad you liked it! Yeah, our dining room is certainly the heart of our home. Everything happens around our dining table: meals, homeschool, board games, coffee and tea with friends, Bible journaling and arts and crafts. Sounds like it’s the same at your house too! 🙂 How long have you been homeschooling?
It looks so pretty! 🙂
Thank you! 🙂
very nicely organized space, and pretty too. Gives me some ideas. 🙂 And yes, mason jars are wonderful storage containers. 🙂
Thanks, Annette!! I love the Mason jars! They are great to organize pencils, pens, paint brushes, washi tapes, paper clips and so much more!
I love these tips! We do school at the kitchen table as it is the space we have. This year is only pre-k but I know each year will come with more “stuff.” Thanks for the organizing ideas. #Titus2Tuesday
Hey, Julie! I’m so glad you liked it. We had to improvise as much as we could without covering our dinning room with learning posters which I was very tempted to do LOL and keeping things in a way I could “hide” them when needed. 😉 How fun is Pre-K! My youngest just started K and we try to keep as fun as we can. Enjoy every step of your homeschool journey!
I love this! We have very similar areas. I store all our homeschool things in our dining room as well. We do most of our school at the table, although now that it’s getting cooler, we do a lot of reading in front of the fire too! You can check out our homeschool area in a post I wrote a couple of months ago ( http://www.thispilgrimlife.com/peek-homeschool-space/) .
Thanks for sharing this post on Crystal’s Live Video! I’m enjoying looking around your beautiful blog. 🙂
Awesome Lisa!! I’m so glad to connect with you and how awesome is Crystal’s blog coaching, eh?? I’m blown away!!!
Why don’t you link up your posts at Blessed MOMdays? Here is the link: https://www.theycallmeblessed.org/blessed-momdays-link-party-6/
We have always homeschooled at the kitchen table. I love this post so much! I love your ideas for having your boards that can stay out most of the time, but can be put away. So many good tips. I just homeschool one now, two have grown up on me, but will implement some of these ideas this year. Thanks! Tired mamas need some fresh ideas ????❤️
Thank you, Josette!! I love finding new ideas for homeschool organization too. Just this week I found some really cool ideas I’ll be sharing on my new blog post coming up, so stay tuned. 🙂
I absolutely love those multi-cube organizers. We have them all over the house and they hold tons of stuff.
Awesome ideas! Way to go1
Yes!! They are so handy. We have a few of those in our living room and bedroom. They do hold a lot of stuff. Thank God for IKEA. ????
We are homeschooling in our dining room. I see some great organizational ideas that I hope to implement over the next few months.
I’m glad to hear that, Tami! We love homeschooling in our dining room table and it is easier on me when I need to cook meals too so I can keep my eyes on them. 😉
Great ideas!
Thank you, Emily!
Thanks for the great ideas! I need to put some of them into play in our dining room. It’s not a huge room but I think I can definitely make it more organized now.
Awesome, Julie! I’m glad you found great ideas here. 🙂
Thank you so much for these awesome ideas!! We have recently started using our dining room as a classroom as well. You have some very helpful tips!
Thank you so much!!
I love these ideas. Makes me want to go pull everything out of my dining room right now and start over!
Why not? 😀 I love organizing and reorganizing! Make sure you join us for our organization challenge in January! 😉
Thank you for the ideas. We currently are homeschooling out of backpacks!
The beauty of homeschooling is the flexibility to do whatever works for our families, right? 😀
As someone who hopes to one day have a homeschool room when we build our house, this is so helpful in the here and now! Thank you!
This has been a much need dose of inspiration for utilizing small spaces and keeping everything accessible and in its place. Thank you!
I consider myself to be a very organized individual. I always enjoy reading others organization tips and seeing what they’ve done to their spaces. Thank you!
Oh….these are some great ideas!!! 🙂 Thank you for sharing them!
Great tips and beautiful room! I want to click on every sing link to check everything out…someday! Thanks for sharing your personal space and ideas.
I love this! We Homeschool in our dining room and use many of the same tricks. I would add that you shouldn’t be afraid to store stuff that you don’t need right now elsewhere: a tub in the garage, a basket on a different bookshelf, etc. If you don’t need it within the next 8 weeks, it doesn’t REALLY need to be in the homeschool space.
Thanks for your post Ana. I homeschool my four (my fifth has graduated) and we’ve always been dining room homeschoolers. We’ve recently moved house and now actually have a dining “room” rather than an open arrangement so I’m grateful for all the organisation tips I can get! Your homeschooling space looks great! Thanks again!
Awesome, Claire!! 🙂 We always have a homeschool organization challenge in January, so make sure you join us! Join our homeschool organization group on Facebook for updates https://www.facebook.com/groups/homeschoolorganization/
Thanks for the great ideas and inspiration. Even after 10 years homeschooling, it’s still helpful to have fresh organizational ideas.
You’re so welcome, Leigh! I am so glad it was helpful! 🙂
I currently have a couple of boxes with our homeschool stuff, but I love the small book cases with boxes. I may need to revisit our set up. Thanks for the great suggestions!!
I swiped your idea of the under bar bookshelf. Genius. There seemed so much wasted space before, and now it is utilized for art curriculum, paints, canvas, and the like. THANKS
Thanks for sharing
These are great ideas, I will definitely be implementing several of them!
I love the ideas and so wish we had an ikea close by. I think I am slowly convincing my husband we should try the shelving at walmart that is similar. Love your dining table! The one we have is one my in-laws purchased before my husband was born. Indestructible but small for our family of 6. I’ll be reading this again more closely to see how I can work on things during the Christmas time my husband his home. 🙂
Thank you, Rebecca!! IKEA is really handy and affordable, though. I have these shelves for years! But use what you have at hand without spending extra money. 😉
Thanks for sharing and inspiring!
You’re so welcome! 🙂
Great share. The way you are trying to store homeschool using simply brilliant.your approach is space saving. I really need this for my small apartment. Thanks for sharing.
I’m glad you liked it!!
I like those blackboards. I always want to buy a blackboard for my kitchen wall with an affirmative message of the day.
Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for linking with us, Heather!!
Wow, this is so creative and amazing idea to organize the homeschooling dinging room. I really like it. Thank fir sharing this wonderful article.
Wow this is an interesting and useful article i think this is the best way to teach child at home.. IN this way they develop their interest in their studies..
Thanks for hearing this article to us
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I love this! We Homeschool in our dining room and use many of the same tricks. I would add that you shouldn’t be afraid to store stuff that you don’t need right now elsewhere: a tub in the garage, a basket on a different bookshelf, etc. If you don’t need it within the next 8 weeks, it doesn’t REALLY need to be in the homeschool space.
Reply
Exactly!!!
Thank you for linking with us, Heather!!
This is really amazing
You made my day
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Its very difficult to organize school home work during school life .
Am also too lazy in my school life .
But i will share these tips with my son .
Thank you
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