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.
We have a small house. It is just over 1,000 square feet, but for our family of four it is all the space that we need.
Notice that I said it is all the space that we need. I didn’t say it is more space than we need. Because we do have small home, we have no extra space. No guest rooms, no bonus rooms and certainly no homeschool room either. When we first began homeschooling this really bothered me. I wanted a homeschool room. I thought I needed a homeschool room. I would look at photos of my friends perfect homeschooling rooms and become insanely jealous. {Not cool, I know!}
I even went so far as to think that our homeschool just didn’t measure up because we didn’t have a specific homeschooling room.
Now, please tell me if you know of anyone who failed at homeschooling simply because they didn’t have a picture perfect homeschool room. Anyone? Nope, I didn’t think so.
It took me a few months, but I finally grew to accept and even sort of enjoy the fact that we didn’t have a specific homeschool room {after all it is just one more room to clean, right?!}.
Are you homeschooling in a small house?
Are you considering homeschooling but are afraid your house is simply too small?
Here are 10 tips for limited space {or as I like to call, whole house} homeschooling:
- Don’t stay confined! I remember when we first started out, I thought school could only be done at the kitchen table. How boring is that? Broaden your horizons. We now have school at the kitchen table, in our bedrooms, in the living room, heck my children have been known to slip a math worksheet under the door while I’m in the bathroom!
- Use the space that you have. Where do your kids like being? In the living room? Do school there. In the kitchen? In the garage? You get the idea.
- Go outside! We love having school on the front porch, on our deck, in our yard. Take advantage of those nice days. It is refreshing to have a change of scenery now and then.
- Stay organized. This is a biggie. Because we have such a small living space, we have to keep our school books/supplies organized, otherwise they take over the house and that is no fun.
- What is that? You said you have an American history timeline in your living room? So do we!! And guess what? That is okay! That is part of using the space you have. No, you won’t find my living room featured in Better Homes and Gardens, but we needed a long wall for our timeline and the living room works perfectly. But what will guests think when they walk in and see the timeline plastered in the living room? Um, let’s see. Maybe that a homeschool family lives here?! I don’t have a problem with that. Do you?
- Spread out! Because our house is tiny, I can have one child doing math in the kitchen and another child doing science in her room and can easily bounce between the two if they’re having a day where they don’t particularly want to be near each other. {Come on, don’t tell me I have the only homeschooled siblings who just a little bit tired of each other now and then!}
- Use file boxes. We love our file boxes. I have one for each child and every day all paperwork goes into the file boxes. That way we don’t have paper all over the house. This is a great way to teach your child to be organized, too!
- Bookshelves are your friend! Bookshelves are wonderful inventions. Built in bookshelves are even better. God must have designed this house just for me because He put built in bookshelves in my dining room. They house all of our school books and supplies and are probably the only thing that keeps my home halfway organized. Both of my children have bookshelves in their bedrooms too. If you’re homeschooling in a small home and you don’t have a bookshelf, I highly suggest getting one to store your school materials on.
- Who knew a white board in the dining room would get so much use? At first, I hated the thought of a white board in the dining room. It ranked right up there with a timeline on the living room wall, but guess what? We use it all the time, and not just for school either. We use it to assign chores, write notes to each other, write phone numbers and reminders.
- And finally, as with all things homeschooling….be flexible! Yes, at times it gets a little close and cramped. But homeschooling in a small house is completely feasible. Just go with the flow. Stay organized and accept that you can’t hide the fact that a homeschooling family lives in your home. And honestly, why would you want to?
Do you homeschool in a small home? What tips and tricks have you found to make your days run more smoothly?
A special thank you to our series sponsor, See The Light.
Great tips! We’re about to embark on a year or two long adventure living in an RV so this will help greatly! One thing that we did here at home – I took chalkboard paint & painted the top of our dining room table to use for homeschooling. Now we can do math problems, make notes, etc, right on the table top! We leave ‘love notes’ for each other on it. Come meal time, I throw a table cloth on it!
I am such a big fan of the Upside Down Homeschooling page on Facebook, and was so glad to see she wrote the article! Way to go, Heather….you bring the joy into homeschooling for so many of us. You are always so real and practical, and this article keeps in step with that. Thank you. I know it will help many. 🙂
We had a timeline on the long wall in our bathroom at the last small place. We had to move it because guests would vanish for ages, looking at the whole wall.
It sounds like our homes are about the same size. I have also gotten over wanting a school room. Over the years (12) I’ve learned to be creative in storing things. Every piece of furniture has drawers. The piano bench even opens up to store things. We don’t have a dining room table, but an ottoman where we store our photo albums. I joke that (God forbid) if we ever have a fire, make sure that ottoman makes it out of the house, too. And like you say, bookshelves are our friends! Every room has two. I’d have them in my room if it weren’t for my husband who won’t let me. lol. I cannot imagine a homeschooler without bookshelves.
My 2 older kids are in high school now, so we have mostly books. No more arts and crafts supplies or workbooks. My youngest daughter uses Time4Learning.com, which is an online curriculum, so that has cut back on a lot of workbooks.
The best things about having a small house is there’s less to clean and there’s greater opportunity for interaction with each other. You can’t hide out in different rooms of the house. I mean, the kids can go to their individual rooms, and they do sometimes, but there’s only one room where we sit to read or watch TV or eat. I’d say the only t hing I wouldn’t mind having is a big family room so we could have enough space to have friends over and be comfortable moving around the house between the living room and the family room.
Yay! We are about to start homeschooling in our tiny house. Thanks for the encouragemnet and great ideas! 🙂
thanks for the great article! I’m happy I’m not the only one with a small house… homeschooling. 😀
Well, I guess I am not the only one with a white board on the dining room wall! Great article!
Good tips! And YES on the bookshelves. Absolutely. And simple bins on (some of) those bookshelves, too.
We also homeschool in a tiny house. I am still trying to figure out how to keep it clean and organized while homeschooling and do housework.
Love the bookshelves and we do use the whole house for our learning. We don’t have a dining room but the white board idea is a good one. We keep art supplies in a plastic tub in the basement. Glad to know that there are others like us!
We have a white board in our dining room too, and a timeline on a door frame! Still hoping for that school room someday though.
WE don’t really have a “small” home, but our space is limited, so this has been a great post for me to read. Thank for sharing
We are a family of five in a 1,040 square ft apartment. It’s hard to get outside unless I’m driving somewhere specifically to get away from the crowds. I’ve been working hard at utilizing furniture that has really great storage and my girls room has extra school supplies in the closet so that I don’t have ALL the school stuff in the dinning room anymore! (Yikes!) We are big crafters and artists so it seems like everything is messy from projects, but I have clothes pins glued onto bamboo sticks that are hung on the wall to hold artwork and everything my girls create to get it quickly “put away” while still showing them off like they should be. That’s been a big help. I’m still learning to use other parts of our house for school. I often get stuck downstairs and don’t use the upstairs of our town home apartment except for sleeping, but their room is now more open (with bunk beds) so that we can actually do more upstairs. I think it would be fun to do different parts of our day in different parts of our house. It would probably remind me to tidy up in all those places too!
We are a family of four in under 1,000 sq ft with early elementary kids who make huge messes! I actually love our small home as it keeps us close. We don’t have a dining room but we do have a larger living room. I floated the sofa in the middle of the room to divide the space. So one side of the living room is the tv/couch and the other side is a dining table and buffet which is backed up to the sofa. I like this setup because when we are just having family time etc. we aren’t looking at the “school” side of the room. Also, we too have several of the white Ikea bookshelves and bought their metal-rimmed cardboard boxes in several sizes to house all our supplies. Everything has a place AND it looks good. We strategically made our learning wall ( primary colored and cluttered) the wall that is least viewed unless you are sitting at the school table. Hope this encourages even more tiny home-schoolers!
We have posters in the family room/dining room, & find that the visitors (my husband is a pastor- there are lots of them) enjoy them. We have lots of book shelves too. I recently purchased a very sturdy wire one that is placed in front of a window. By using the eye-level shelves for flat things, we can still see the bird feeder outside, & the wire shelving lets in light at all levels.
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First of all I have to say I love your blog. You have some amazing ideas and tips. This is our first year of homeschooling and I too have a small house. We started out all over the house as well, but my daughter recently got married and freed up a room for us so we get the pleasure of having a homeschool room. I love the fact that everything we need is in one room, but sometimes I feel like I am growing to the walls in there because we spend so much time in it. One good thing about our room is that it has a door that leads straight out in the yard so we can open it up and let the fresh air in and that helps a bunch. Sometimes we just step outside and play for a few minutes. Thanks for all the tips 🙂
Currently we are a family if seven living in 980 sq. ft.
Oh the precious commodity that ‘space’ is. We have bookshelves every where. Kitchen, living room, laundry room and bedrooms. Yes, laundry room. (My pantry, lol)
With five kids, two in second grade, one in fourth, one in ninth and the last in tenth, we cover a little of everything. I have a white board in my kitchen as we do not have a separate dining room. There are often times we overlap in subjects for everyone. But oh the adventures we have!
We live in a tiny one bedroom apartment, my eight year old daughter and I. We have five rooms and a hallway. There is the living room, dining room, which is really a wall, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and the hallway. The hallway has my desk, my daughter’s bookcase, two shelves on the wall and two metal paper racks. That is considered my office. We home school in the dining room. For the first nine months, our dining room was set up for potential guess but the truth is we never have guest. We are embarrassed of our neighbors so if it isn’t a piano student coming for a lesson, we don’t entertain. I decided as a gift to my daughter I would decorate our dining room and set it up as a full blown home school. We bought posters and put them on the walls. I got her containers for her pencils, pens, markers, and paints. A little shelf for supplies and put all of my craft modules together in one section of the room. She loved it. I too was secretly envious of all the homeschool rooms that people were posting. Now in our tiny little space, we have a room of our own that we are comfortable in, and when the whether is nice, which it is in California a lot or we have cabin fever, we go to the bay or Barnes and Nobles and have school. You don’t need a special room, you just need organization and a little creativity.