Sculpting the Ideal Homeschooling Space

It can be very hard to homeschool at home – if that makes any sense!

Why?

Because distractions ABOUND. A pot that needs to be stirred, a mess that needs to be tidied, toys not far from workbooks, laundry that needs to be done, ringing doorbells,….and a million other demons conspire against our best-laid plans and goals.

It’s every homeschool parent’s dream to have one of those Pinterest-worthy homeschool classrooms with perfectly matching desks, cubbies, towering bookshelves….with natural light, high ceilings, and most of all a neat place to store everything.

Okay, when you are done dreaming I want to talk about 6 things you can do to at least make your un-photogenic homeschool space more ideal.

6 Tips for Sculpting the Ideal Homeschooling Space

 

1 – Clean Your Kitchen Table

It’s your best, safest bet for a workspace. Remove place-mats, napkin holders, vases, crumbs and sticky spills, everything….get the table totally naked and keep it that way as much as possible.

I highly recommend “math for breakfast” which is my policy of clearing the breakfast dishes and seguing straight into math without their fannies leaving their seats. I say get what for most families is the toughest subject out of the way right off the bat. Everything will coast downhill afterwards. This is also rooted in the persistent reality that it can be very hard for kids AND parents to get math done at nighttime when our daily willpower is spent.

2 – Manage Your Books

As homeschoolers library books can totally take over our abodes. Books are strewn in both of our cars, in everyone’s bedrooms, on the couches, in the den, in the basement, etc.

There has to be a semblance of a system. A centralized pile of to-be-read books and a pile of read-books to be returned.

This won’t totally work of course. Us parents are over-matched against juvenile bibliophilia….but my 2-pile or a 2-bin system will at least provide some organization and may limit your “lost book” library fines a little.

Schedule it in your calendar to check your library account online every Sunday. That’s what I do. Thankfully we can renew books quite easily with a click of the mouse. It may sound crazy but you can even put your kids in charge of doing this too!

3 – Throw Out Art

Not their best work of course and not instantly like Jerry Seinfeld does with his birthday cards….but very, very soon.

Take a digital picture. Take a video of it.

Then liberate your house of most all arts and crafts.

You have a big house and plenty of room?

Well then store it all. Store every single “hand-turkey”, finger painting, and collage. You can certainly take the digital pics and scrap them in a few years or a few decades time – though they might be wilting and faded!

4 – Corral Your PCs

Children may work best splintered off when they are reading. BUT on the computer, I prefer constant surveillance.

I prefer desktop computers to laptops and tablets that may wander off. Bigger screens are waaaaay better but also because mobile devices are tough to manage and tough to monitor.

I’ve always had my PC….right next to my kids’ PCs and while it may be a little distracting to me, I want to do everything I can to control their web surfing.

5 – Workbox It

With younger kids the workbooks, worksheets, manipulatives, and books can easily get out of control. You don’t need to buy any fancy “work box” system. You can certainly make your own. So just Google it. Check out examples on Pinterest.

One of these sets of rolling drawers will burst into your homeschool full of promise….but you’ll soon find out it’s no panacea as your kids will just “not see” one or more of the assignments you meticulously laid out. Or the drawers will become misaligned from cheap construction and child abuse…

Fortunately older kids do have less crap stuff because their books are denser, they learn a lot more online, etc. So there’s a light at the end of the messy tunnel…

6 – Surrender. Move Into the Library

It took me my entire first semester of college to learn this lesson – that I NEEDED to go to the library to get my studying done.

Here in my homeschool we set out for the library almost 5 days per week – and not just to get and return books.

We load up some academic books, Bananagrams, a chess board, worksheets, my laptop, and anything else that’s needed and camp out at our local, and even distant, libraries.

It’s just as relatively productive as the Van Pelt Library was for me at UPenn. Distractions are minimized. Clean surfaces are abundant. And if we go before school gets out the libraries are blissfully silent.

Okay. Even though my kids are 9 and 10 and will be moving out in the blink of an eye….I admit we are still arrogantly trying to sculpt our ideal homeschool space. Watch the video:

And here’s what our space looked like when we lived in a smaller home (a “flat”!) in London:

If you are going to homeschool properly….your house is going to be a mess and no system, no extra room, no nothing is going to prevent it.

I’m OKAY with this trade-off. (My wife is still on the fence!)

Because I know that a clean but EMPTY and QUIET house in a few years is really going to suck.

[Dan1]