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Homeschool Room Tour

Since I’m a huge fan of a good homeschool room tour, I wanted to take the opportunity to give you all a virtual tour of our homeschool room … but since we use All The Spaces to “do homeschooling,” this turned out to be more of a home tour than a room tour :).

Backstory

In my pre-child life, I taught Math for 6 years with a Masters in Teaching. My approach to homeschooling draws heavily on that experience … in that I want my own children’s educational experience to look nothing like a formal classroom ;).

My philosophy on learning

My underlying philosophy on learning is that I want to create a learning-rich environment and help foster my kids’ innate desire and ability to learn holistically – drawing from the resources we provide and the real world they live in to develop a love of learning.

With that goal in mind, I’ve been building up a library of books, toys, games, puzzles, and memberships (to museums and zoos), as well as focusing on cultivating positive family and friend relationships so that our kids can grow up learning from others and living in healthy social environments.

All the pictures!

Here’s a little virtual tour of what this looks like in our home, at the moment. This goes through constant iterations as our needs change and as I think of better ways to re-arrange things ;).

IKEA!

I love how this room (our “official homeschool room”) turned out!! It’s completely decked out with IKEA furniture :).

(IKEA tip: We don’t have an IKEA in our city <sad face!> but we did find out that for a flat fee (of $59, I think), you can order as much as you want and it will get delivered to your home – no matter how far away you live!*)

(*I don’t know what the terms and conditions on this offer are – just sharing that it worked out great for us! 🙂 )

Work spaces

The computer station is my main work space, and the kids have the whole floor space – which is used much more frequently than any tables or desks in the house, since it is the largest horizontal surface ;).

The easel gets used randomly – it’s mostly for fun, not for actual lessons, although sometimes we’ll do spelling practice or math practice on it to change things up.

The boys each have a little desk under the windows (pictured above). These have the very predictable problem of quickly getting too messy to use repeatedly … but when they are clean, they get used for crafts 🙂 – and sometimes actual “school work.”

Reading corner

This rocking chair corner gets used for reading, rocking the baby, making crafts (everything gets used for making crafts!), and late night chats with boys who sneak downstairs after lights out.

The posters on the wall are a set of inspirational growth mindset quotes from famous inventors that I made as we read through inventor biographies together.

Creation Station

This Creation Station has gone through several iterations – but I love this version the most!

My biggest challenge is convincing the kids that THIS is where the crafts live. They must be my kids, however, because they love setting up mini versions of their own craft centers all around the house.

They’re seriously like little squirrels when it comes to hoarding craft supplies in every nook and cranny they can find or create. Someday I dream that when we need a pair of scissors or tape we can actually come here and find them.

This picture was taken immediatlely after I set it up, since I knew I’d never have a chance to take a good picture of it again ;). It has, however, worked better than any other system I’ve set up, and the kids theoretically know which basket, drawer, and bucket every crayon, sticker, paper, and toilet paper cardboard tube live in.

Non-fiction bookshelf

This is our non-fiction bookshelf. It used to live in the official homeschooling room, but was completely overlooked in there. (Probably because the Creation Station and the entire inviting floor space were too stiff of competition!)

I’ve recently moved it out to the sun room (picture below) where it’s the only directly homeschool related thing – and since it’s so easy to see and clearly labeled, both the kids and I have daily been inspired to just pull books off it and read them.

Living books

THIS is how I dream our homeschool will go! 🙂 I love how living books* are intriguing enough to “jump off the shelves” and invite exploration – it often bypasses the need for scheduled lesson plans and fills our days with spontaneous learning moments that follow our children’s present interests.

(*books that are written in a fascinating way by people who are experts in that particular subject and invite kids to deeply explore a topic through beautiful images, easy-to-read text, and often some interactive element … not a textbook … — that’s my take on the definition of Living Books, anyway)

These books are mostly too advanced for our kids just yet, but that doesn’t stop them from looking through them and getting introduced to great science and history and geography and math concepts :).

My sources

I’ve picked up these books from used book stores, library book sales, books my parents saved for us from my own childhood, and a ton of books my dad gave me when he retired from teaching elementary school.

Math and Science

The plastic drawers on the right are home to all our math manipulatives from RightStart Math.

The drawers on the left house all our random science related things.

Masterpieces

This corner has several things going on.

We hung a rope up to display masterpiece projects – things that are worth a few extra days of attention before they hit the portfolio (or trash) pile.

The world map is a wall sticker set from the dollar store :).

Details

The gray magazine holders house a few of our curriculum sets (like Story of the World for History, Write Shop for writing, and one for our lapbooks in progress).

We were gifted Little Passports and love it as a fun addition to our eclectic Geography resources.

The shelves are mostly for activity books (several from the dollar store!).

The games as a small selection of our games – mostly picked up from thrift stores.

(Seriously though – between the dollar store, thrift stores, hand-me-downs, the library, the internet, and the world at large … what else do you even need to homeschool?)

The drawers are an attempt at minimizing the toys we keep on the main level. I thought I would rotate toys through here, but it turns out that since the toys in these buckets are not easy to see, they mostly get ignored. I could probably get rid of all of them without being caught … hmmm …

Sunroom

This is our sunroom – we keep it kind of free from toys … we’ve recently moved the lego table up to the boys’ room and the baby crib into this room. This is where we all spend most of our time :).

I love the snuggles shared and memories made here!

Natural habitat

And no homeschool room tour would be complete without a real life picture of kids working in their natural habitat ;). Do we really even need a house? (Answer – yes. For all the craft supplies!)

Loft beds

My husband made these beds for the boys! So mostly this is a picture to show what a great job he did :).

The under-the-bed part has served as an office space, book club, camp-out, CRAFT STATION!, and generally messy area. This was a clean moment so I had to take a picture :).

Organizing tips

See this post for ideas on organizing your digital and paper homeschooling files.

Planner Board Video Tour

In this video I talked about our “homeschool planner board tour” – you can see it here.

Recommended products

Here’s a few products we’ve used and found helpful in setting up “learning-rich environments.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this homeschool room tour with little inside glimpse into a few moments where our house was clean :).

I’d love to hear any tips you’ve found for creating happy, resource-rich learning spaces for your own kids!

If you have any questions about anything I shared here, leave a comment below and I’m happy to continue the conversation.

Learning Resources for Teachers, Tutors, and Parents

If you’d like to visit my store to see my library of learning resources (focused on Pre-K – 3rd grade Math, Reading, and Writing, and High School Algebra and Geometry), you can check it out here:

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