Welcome to The Homeschool Village’s first ever Tour of Home{schools}!  We are so excited that you stopped in. We hope that you will find encouragement and ideas for all types of spaces, styles and personalities.

Have you heard the advice to store books in every room to help your children learn to love reading?

That’s some of my favorite advice, and we have books in the living room, dining room, bedrooms, and even the bathroom. And, the most important part of this strategy is we use the books in each room daily.

What if we applied that same method to offering opportunities for fitness? Could we have space – even in small spaces – for fitness at any point in the day, too?

A Few Considerations

• Space might be an issue for you. (It is here.)
• Equipment might be another issue. (Yep.) You want something able to be used freely at any point of the day that’s also easy to access and clean up.
• How about safety? Putting jump ropes in the dining room probably doesn’t support safe play.
• And you need to consider your children’s individual needs. My son has various special needs, including some balance instabilities. The equipment I make readily available for him to use (somewhat on his own) needs to be safe for his movement needs.

Ideas for Incorporating Fitness in Your Homeschool Spaces

We’re one of those families that homeschools in pretty much any room. We might change this method as the kids grow other, but we learn at the kids’ table in the dining room, the kids’ room, my room occasionally, and the living room.

See below for a few ideas on how we create opportunities for fitness in each of homeschooling space:

Living Room

The indoor-safe basketballs and bouncy balls are in this bin under a table. Our son can walk over any time and pull the basket out, grab a ball, and play at his indoor basketball goal. (Our youngest is learning how to do this, too!) We also store a mini trampoline nearby for therapies and times when our strong sensory seeker needs some deep sensory input (though this isn’t readily available since he can only use it with a parent).

Dining Room

I recently reorganized some school materials to make a few things accessible to our preschooler and easier for me to access (and therefore use much more often with the kids—more practice means more growth!). I added fitness equipment to one of the bins on the storage unit that the kids may access during the day. This bin holds an indoor-safe bouncy ball, homemade color dots, and fabric squares/scarves for active play.

Bedrooms

In the kids’ room, we keep one bin filled with activity equipment. Those half domes are useful for balance exercises, directions, and activities integrating colors and numbers. The beanbags are very soft and one toy my son is allowed to throw (down, not at people or objects) when he need more sensory input. We also have a play tunnel stored in the room, and very soft, small indoor balls. The large stability ball does need to be used with a parent, but it moves between the bedrooms and provides opportunity for motor control, balance exercises, and fun.

A few more equipment ideas: one-pound medicine balls, rubber color dots (polyspots) like these for jumping and games, a small six-foot indoor parachute, indoor bowling sets (homemade or store-bought), and homemade fitness dice like these.

Kids naturally want to move. As we offer space and ideas for movement (and when we jump in and play, too!), we encourage our kids to keep moving for years to come!

How do or could you provide opportunities, space, and ideas for fitness in (nearly) every room of your house? If you have some space you’re not sure what to do with or an idea you can’t figure quite how to incorporate, share in the comments! We can all help each other with some ideas.

A special thank you to our series sponsor, See The Light.