Homeschooling In A Small House

nikiz628

I have been "homeschooling" my 3 (almost 4) year old or about a year now. We do a lot of play based learning, with a weekly theme. We generally have to work at the dining room table. Our house is small, 2 bedrooms, about 1,000 sq ft. Right now I have all of our materials in his closet (I call it organized chaos). I was wondering if others have found ways to organize/homeschool in a small space. We have opted to continue homeschooling with a little more structure for another year, so I want to get everything organized and ready to go. Thanks in advance!

Mama-Bear

I would suggest searching Pinterest (LINK) and you'll come across so many blogs.  You can see different setups, the pros, and the cons to homeschooling in a smaller home. 

wifeofadam

We have six people in 1600 square feet.  Our dining room is our "school room", I guess, although we do school all over the house - couch, bed, back deck, kitchen, etc.  But I use the dining room as the main storage area.  The drawers in our hutch hold supplies and then I have filing cabinets in there, too.  We also have a bookshelf in almost every room of the house.  One shelf holds all of the non-fiction research type books.  One holds Bibles and devotionals.  One holds all of the kids' story books.  Others hold things like dictionaries and thesauruses.  Then we turned the linen closet by the bedrooms into the storage area for things like manipulatives, games, craft supplies, etc. 

You can see some of the dining room here:



Here's the wall behind where DS is sitting.  We keep things like pens, markers, glue, and other supplies in the cans on the mantle:



It's not the most attractive room, but it's comfortable and functional for the kids.

Rocshana

I recently read an article online which explained how one can overcome the constraints (though I do not believe there are many!) and make the most of what you have. Here's what it said:

• If you think the dining table is the only place for studying, think again. You can use your kitchen, the garden and the garage and get a lot out of these places as well with a variety of DIY fun activities incorporated into your homeschooling curriculum.
• Make it a point to sit in the sunlight in the porch or garden for classes whenever possible.
• Put in built-in bookshelves wherever you can. They'll help a lot and not just to store books.
• Set up a white board in the dining room with a temporary marker for company. Apart from using it to pen down your homeschooling timeline, you can use it to assign chores, write notes to each other and also for phone numbers and other reminders.