Organizing your Homeschool Space
It’s time to begin organizing your homeschool space!
If you haven’t started already, it’s time to look at what needs to be completed before the beginning of the new school year, what’s working, what’s not working, revamping the schedule and curriculum, and organizing the house to make the school year a smooth one.
For tips and advice for all kinds of homeschool organization from schedules to space you will want to register for the Free Basic Pass to the 2025 Homeschool Super Heroes Online Conference.
Now’s the time to shop during the sales when all of the dorm and locker organization supplies are out in full force!
Organizing the homeschool usually means organizing books and curriculum, as well as a family schedule that includes school and everyone’s activities.
This article addresses organizing space and materials with some suggested resources to help you get there.
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For ideas in organizing your homeschool day and family schedule, read the article Organizing Your Homeschool Schedule.
Organizing Homeschool Books
Homeschoolers have lots of books. To organize all of these different kinds of books, separating them and placing each kind in its own “home” is the way to defeat confusion and clutter.
Books for mom the teacher and books for everyone’s reference can go on their own shelves. (If you are tight for space, but have extra room in a closet, an inexpensive plastic shelf from Home Depot or Lowe’s works great.)
We used these kinds of shelves in a large double door closet after I removed the closet rod that hangs down (it keeps our homeschool stuff in a space that can be concealed if we didn’t to look at it –
These books are not used as often and are not pulled out every day, or only mom needs to pull out certain ones.
Workbooks, notebooks, and books used by the kids every day should have their own special home. Our guys put their work and books in an assigned crate they could pull their stuff from.
A crate for each child put into a corner of the room, closet floor, or bottom bookshelf works well for kids to place their daily activities. Color coding for each child is a terrific idea, and each child will enjoy picking out his favorite color. If you can’t find different colors, there is usually a place for a label sticker on the front (like the one in this picture).
You want to make sure you pick sturdy plastic like this one. I’ve tried cheaper versions with thinner plastic and it can’t take the wear and tear and the plastic chips off or breaks and causes sharp edges.
If you do not want to use a crate, a specially designated shelf would work as well. Skinny workbooks sit better on a shelf in a plastic magazine holder, the bottom half of a narrow box, or in a cereal box with the top third cut off.
Paperbacks or children’s picture books that always seem to get lost on the shelf are easy to find when you use a rectangular plastic box or shoe box. You’d want to make sure your books would fit this size.
These also would be great for supplies or busy boxes for littles to keep them occupied while you work with older kiddos one on one.
Place the books in single file with fronts facing out in the box on a shelf and flipping through the books (like you would with files) makes your book easy to find and children do not have to take any other books off the shelf causing the whole row to slide down.
Here’s another type of box that works well with books facing one direction and works for larger/thin books and folders –
It saves space on your bookshelves too, providing more room for even more of those books!
Organizing Homeschool Supplies
For odds and ends used in science experiments, math manipulatives, and other smaller items, wash bins or tubs from a dollar store placed on a shelf in a closet keeps track of these items and provides easy clean up and storage.
There are also cleaning totes with compartments and handles for art and crafts supplies such as colored pencils, crayons, and glue sticks at dollar stores.
Or for separate smaller trays or bins, you could purchase a multipack with assorted sizes for all of your supplies and keep them them organized separately.
We also used those plastic organizers on wheels that had about three large clear drawers from Walmart for these kinds of materials and paper supplies and notebooks. We had several smaller ones and one wide one for all of our paper – notebook paper, graph paper for math, construction paper for all sorts of things, assorted larger craft supplies like rulers, hole punch, stencils, folders, spiral notebooks.
Besides Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe’s for shelving and closet organization systems, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Office Depot, Staples, and Office Max have many different storage and organizing materials.
The various dollar stores offer creative solutions on a budget. For ideas and innovative solutions try The Container Store for ideas.
If any of you have any organizing space ideas, please share them with us!
