Learn how to create space for homeschooling. Whether a room or a nook, there is space to home school.
Here's what you'll learn in this article:
- How to create a home school space (or spaces) that works for your family.
- Four tips for creating and maintaining a home school space throughout the year.
- Answers to common questions about creating a home school space.
- Key takeaways for creating and maintaining a home school space that fits your family’s needs.
- How to learn more about creating a home school space and resources to support managing home school materials.
Creating a Home School Space Can Have Its Challenges, Especially Maintaining and Adapting the Space
When you commit to homeschooling your children, you are undertaking an ongoing project that includes a lot of different elements--from giving lessons to gathering materials that support the home school experience. It takes upfront effort to build new routines (see our article on creating a home school planner), and it takes continuous effort to maintain and elevate the home school experience as your children grow.
Creating a home school space is a key early step in the process when you first start homeschooling, but it is also a recurring activity. Building from what you want from the home school experience, you can design a space that supports and encourages your children’s learning throughout the year. With forethought, planning, and a little creativity, you can create a stylish and functional space to help you crush home school.
Four Tips for Creating a Home School Space
Whether you have decided to start homeschooling or you are interested in revamping your existing space, here are four tips to help you create a home school space that works for your family:
1. Let Your Style Preferences Guide Your Initial Decision-Making
Chances are you have a style in your home that works for you (e.g., modern and minimal or warm and traditional). This can provide great inspiration for how to create a home school space that fits your family.
If you don’t have a style in your home or want to try out a different style for home school, recognize that this might take more effort and stand out more in your home (though this could also help provide separation between your home school and home life experiences). Take photos of spaces you like in your home, and look for additional inspiration online. As you look over spaces to define your look, consider how much space you want to dedicate to homeschooling.
2. Use Your Daily Schedule to Figure Out What You Need from Your Home School Space
Creating a home school space is more than the aesthetic of cozy furniture and well-prepared materials. It is foremost about function.
A well-prepared home school space is a valuable tool to support and encourage a variety of learning activities. A prepared space that aligns with your daily home school schedule exposes your child to the process of learning and provides comfort in the familiarity of that process. For example, if your daily home school schedule includes a morning routine, then create a space that enables you to do that part of your routine easily--like a set table space with the current morning reading. A functional home school space will have all the materials your child needs to focus on their learning activities.
3. Regularly Observe How Your Home School Space is Working
Even if you thoughtfully prepare your home school space, it can become stale or cluttered over time. Your child is always growing, so activities that once held a lot of interest may become less appealing overnight. Similarly, a busy time of year with extra projects might lead to disorganization.
With this in mind, you should make reevaluating your home school space a regular part of your home school planning (i.e, each day, week, quarter, and year). When the morning routine is done, have your child return the materials to be ready for tomorrow. Relatedly, at the end of the week when you are considering the week to come, take stock of your spaces and spend a few moments making adjustments to help support and facilitate next week’s learning. Reevaluating your home school space as part of your regular planning routine will help you keep it organized, fresh, and inviting.
4. Adapt Your Home School Space to Recognize Milestones
As children progress in their schooling, their needs change. Adjusting spaces to these shifting needs is built into the routine of traditional school, where a new year is clearly defined by a new classroom that’s been prepared in the prior summer.
You can adapt your home school spaces too.
Once your child has mastered an activity, remove the relevant materials from your home school space and replace them with those needed for a new learning activity. For example, once your child knows how to count, you can move on to beads that encourage skip counting in preparation for future mathematical operations.
Interest is another factor to consider when thinking about adapting your home school space over time. Crushing home school includes providing exposure to new learning experiences that help your child find and explore their interests. If you think they will be interested in pottery, then you might set out clay and invest in a used children's pottery wheel. If you give a lesson on the material, and your children aren’t interested, don’t force it right now. Put the materials away for later, and try again with something else. Adapt your home school space as part of your regular home school routine to encourage new learning experiences.
FAQs: Creating a Space for Homeschooling
What if I don’t have a lot of space to home school or don’t want to use a lot of space?
Crushing home school isn’t about the amount of space or the quantity of materials you have in your home. It is about being intentional with your children's learning experiences and making them easily accessible as part of the home school day.
If you want to minimize the space you use for homeschooling, then opt to more frequently prepare and rotate materials. For example, maybe you use a couple of small shelves or trays that contain just what is needed for each subject for the day or week.
Alternatively, you could arrange general household items in designated spaces as needed. For example, if you gather materials for a science experiment to be conducted that day in the kitchen, then make sure they are all put away after the experiment. If this is your preferred approach, you’ll want to consider how to still encourage independent learning. Continuing with the science experiment example, maybe your child has a list or set of guidelines they can use when gathering household materials for learning that includes returning them when they are finished.
How do I have mixed-use objects and spaces that serve home and school needs?
Creating distinction between home and school activities when homeschooling is important. No one wants to feel like they are at school all the time. Adults who work from home readily recognize the importance of creating distinction between work spaces and home spaces, even if that means taking a literal walk around the house as a sort of "commute" before beginning work for the day.
With that said, with home school, it is more about the behaviors associated with particular objects and spaces and setting cues for what is appropriate in the moment. For example, if your child has a tablet that is used for home and school, then organize one screen with school-appropriate activities and another with home-appropriate activities. Likewise, if your child enjoys learning from the couch, then ensure that the space is in “school mode” without home distractions like a remote on the coffee table or the TV on in the background.
Key Takeaways
- Creating space is important. A space for home school helps define school and promote new learning experiences, while letting you observe what is and isn’t of interest to your child.
- Use your style. Let your home’s style guide the aesthetic of your home school space.
- Use your daily home school schedule. Your daily home school schedule will highlight what spaces and materials you need for homeschooling.
- Observe your space. Observing how your home school space works (and how it doesn't) is a key source of feedback on how your child is engaging with learning activities and growing.
- Adapt the space. Don't forget that you will need to adapt your home school space to meet your children's changing needs as they learn and grow.
Our resource, Creating a Space for Home School, discusses these considerations--and many more--in much more depth. Whether you are getting ready to home school or you are looking for guidance on updating your existing home school space, we encourage you to check it out.
Where to Learn More
If you would like more tips for improving your children's home school experience, consider becoming a member of Crush Home School! With our membership plan, you get monthly guidance delivered to your inbox with downloadable resources and much more. Learn more about becoming a Crush Home School member.