School Room Organization for a Big Family

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 for all types of homeschooling, personalites, and spaces. A special thank you to our series sponsor, See The Light.

 

There are so many benefits to having a large family, too numerous to count.  However, one of the very few disadvantages is that a mom has to really stay on top clutter, particularly a homeschooling mom!  It can be challenging to find a spot for everything.  Organization is key when school six children.  How often is it that no one can find a pencil or a piece of paper?   Not to mention math books that can easily go missing.

How do we avoid missing homeschool items?

We are fortunate that we do have a separate room to store our books and our other homeschooling materials.  It’s not a big enough space  for all of us to fit, so we do a bulk of our work at the kitchen table, on the couch, or the family room floor.

Bookshelves have been a huge help in keeping us organized.  Also, I’m a big fan of magazine holders.  Each child has a magazine holder for extra items or items that I want to save for a particular child, but he or she isn’t quite ready for the material yet.  Each of the older children have a shelf in the bookcase.  There I store their notebooks, lesson plans and teacher guides.

I like to use magazine holders to organize our Five in a Row books too.  We have volumes one, two, and three, so it’s very easy to find what we need when we need it.

 

The books that are being used by the older children each week are kept in Ikea bins and shelves.  Each older child has their own bin.  I fill it up the bin with what is needed for the following week, along with their assignment sheet.  I can then tuck the bin back into the shelving unit for the weekend {or whenever else we aren’t doing school}.  Then on Sunday night I pull the bins out and place them on our kitchen counter.  The bins stay on the counter during the week.

Admittedly the counter gets a bit messy during the week.  This seems to be our catch all area.  Everyone walks into the kitchen and dumps their stuff on the counter.  I make a point to spruce up during the week, but then on Friday afternoon the whole area is tidied and ready for the new week.

This system has worked great for us this year.  No lost books!  I don’t anticipate much tweaking for the following school year, only adding more bins as the younger kids get older.

This series sponsored by See The Light