Do you have a homeschool room in your house? Or, maybe you don’t have a dedicated room, but you do most of your homeschooling in a specific place like on the living room couch or around the kitchen table.
Whether your family is a new or long-time homeschool family, creating a space within your home where you do most of your at-home learning — like reading, writing, and working through your curriculum — can be hugely beneficial.
Do You Need a Homeschool Room?
First things first — do you even need a separate homeschool space in your home?
Not at all. While it can certainly help to have a dedicated homeschool room, not every family has access to a spare room to use. If you live in a small space, you can always transform the kitchen table into a desk or the living room into your classroom.
Also, keep in mind that not all homeschooling is schooling at home! Instead, consider a home-centered education where your house is your family’s Learning HQ, but you still find opportunities to learn outside the home, like at your local park or on a field trip.
Reasons to Create a Homeschool Room
So, while you don’t need a homeschool room to teach your child successfully, having a dedicated space where your family does most of your at-home learning can still be helpful.
Here are a few reasons why your family might want a homeschool room, or at least a dedicated homeschool space.
1. Easy Access to Your Resources and Materials
The most practical reason to have a homeschool room is to have one place in the house where you keep all your curriculum, resources, books, and other necessities like pencils and paper.
A well-organized homeschool room with all these must-haves makes a world of difference in everyday homeschooling — no more playing hide-and-seek with your Foundations Curriculum throughout the entire house when it’s always stored neatly by your desk in your homeschool room.
2. Create an Environment Where Learning Comes Naturally
Secondly, having a specific place in the house to do most of your at-home learning might motivate your child to take their education more seriously. In other words, if your child learns in the homeschool room, they will know it’s time to learn when they enter that room.
Of course, we want to encourage our children to understand that learning isn’t something that just occurs in the home. Instead, learning is a beautiful part of life that permeates all places and activities.
That said, having a dedicated study space in the home can still benefit your family by being an intentional place to focus on schoolwork.
3. Learn Together
A third reason your family might consider setting up a homeschool room or space is to have a place to all learn together.
If you have multiple children, studying in the same space shows them that homeschooling is not an individual but a family effort. Indeed, having a homeschool room may even strengthen your family relationships. For example, by learning together in the same space, when your youngest student needs help with diagramming a sentence, they can easily ask your eldest for help.
Of course, keep in mind that personal space is often needed! So, while everyone’s desks may be in the homeschool room, don’t stop one of your students if they want to read elsewhere in the house.
3 Steps to Set Up Your Homeschool Room
Are you considering setting up a homeschool room? Whether establishing your Learning HQ in the living room or the spare office, here are a few steps to take to get started.
1. Find a Desk or Table
First, you and your child will need somewhere to write on. If you can’t find a desk or don’t have space for one, the kitchen table will work just as well.
While your family won’t want to spend all your time sitting around a desk, a large portion of at-home work involves writing. Whether diagramming a sentence, solving a math problem, or translating a Latin passage, it’s helpful to have a desk or table your family can write at.
2. Gather Your School Materials
As mentioned earlier, keeping all your materials in the same room as you do your schooling is hugely beneficial. This way, you don’t have to search the entire house whenever you need a pencil or a book.
So, what resources do you need in your homeschool room? Well, your curriculum is a no-brainer, as are any physical books your student will read during the year. A Bible, dictionary, thesaurus, and atlas are great to keep around in your homeschool room as well to reference quickly.
In addition, materials like pencils, crayons, scissors, notebooks, binders, and college-ruled paper are must-haves for any homeschool room. Finally, your homeschool room is an ideal place to keep a computer for typing papers, researching, or accessing CC Connected.
3. Organize All the Things
Wherever you set up your homeschool space, organization is key to creating an environment where you and your child want to learn.
Any homeschool family knows all too well that books tend to pile up year after year, so investing in bookshelves is a natural place to begin organizing your homeschool room.
Other homeschool organization ideas are to use baskets or storage bins to house binders, notebooks, and other miscellaneous materials. If your desk has drawers, these can be ideal places for pencils, paper, tape, and other tools you need to access easily.
The Perfect Homeschool Room Doesn’t Exist
Have you ever searched for homeschool room ideas on Pinterest or Instagram? The organization in these photos is always outstanding.
But do you ever wonder where the real-life mess is?
Of course, there is no such thing as the perfect homeschool room. You can choose the room in the house that receives the most sunlight throughout the day, decorate it with beautiful artwork, set houseplants in just the right places, and organize all our materials and resources into labeled bins. But as soon as you get in there and start learning with your family, your homeschool room will get messy.
So, as with all things in homeschooling, don’t hold your homeschool room to unrealistic expectations. Instead, embrace and welcome the everyday mess that comes with homeschooling your child. That’s just reality!
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