Homeschooling without a school room

It's pretty common to find on home school lists, questions about how to best arrange the school room when you start homeschooling.

I did a lot of research myself -- until I realized that we wanted to make homeschooling and learning a part of our entire family culture and so we didn't want to segregate it into a room of its own, where, like in school, learning was something you "have to do" for a certain number of hours a day and then you can get back to having fun. We want the learning to *be* the fun!

That said, we still need to keep our materials organized, lest they take over completely.

What we have done, it to make the "school materials" a part of the decor in the main room where we socialize, eat, and live. I'll show you around, if you promise not to sneer at the mess. ;)

This is the stereo, which we use for audio books and music. Of course.

You can see here, the main cabinets. In the pair of brown, closed cabinets (leftover kitchen cabinets found on the roadside on trash day) we keep some of the materials for future years. Because it's out of sight, we don't keep anything there that we want to use soon. We tend to forget that its there.

The white cabinet (from Target) contains our materials about homeschooling on top and Jack's art and craft supplies in the middle. In the bottom cabinet are Jack's hands on materials. If it's there, it's his to use "whenever". At various times it has contained a "cutting box" lego, a pouring exercise, a "tongs and cotton balls" transfer exercise, lego, counting bead box, and stuff like that.

In the big book shelf in the corner (really inexpensive particle board) is our main shelf with current materials. They're arranged roughly by "subject".

Since history is our spine, the top two shelves contain a lot of history that might be useful this year. The next shelf is science. After that, language, music, and art. Books get pulled off this shelf at the beginning of a unit and put back on this shelf as they're completed for that unit if they will be reused for another unit or "released into the wilds", either of our house or someone else's via the kids book exchange.

Also, the table is where most of our work takes place.

This is the material for our current unit. (As you can see, we're nearing the end of a unit.) On the round table (KMart) is all of the read-aloud material. In the basket shelf (25 cents at a resale shop) is the material for Jack to read for himself.

And, of course, the time line, above the current materials.

We also have a lot of craft materials upstairs in the craft room, but that I won't be photographing until after I clean up there. ;)

It works well for us, and I thought it might reassure people who are afraid they can't homeschool because they live in a small house or don't have a lot of money to set up a classroom. Most of this was furniture we already had and pressed into service. A few things we bought (or found) especially for the purpose. But we didn't spend a lot. It doesn't resemble a "school" -- but it does the job of keeping us organized.