This is our fourth year homeschooling, and we have live in a relatively small home. There is no extra room that we can dedicate specifically to homeschooling.
That’s why we have our homeschool set up in our dining room. It absolutely works!
If you are new to homeschooling and looking for ways to set up your homeschool without dedicating an entire room to it, using your dining room table is a great option.
It’s always helpful to see how other homeschooling families set up their space too. So today, I’m giving you a tour of our homeschool set up in our dining room.
Plus I’ll show you some ways we store and organize all of the homeschool supplies throughout our home.
Homeschooling Set Up Ideas
Before I show you the tour, here are some other ideas you may want to consider.
1. Rolling Cart
A great way to store your homeschool supplies is in a rolling cart (affiliate link). You can easily roll it out to the dining room during school hours, and roll it into a closet all the other times.
2. Cabinet or Bookshelf
Use a cabinet or tall book shelf to contain homeschool supplies and books. This could be part of a china cabinet that you already have in your dining room.
Or maybe you purchase an entire bookshelf to dedicate to school supplies. Last year, we used these cubbies that I got from Amazon.
3. Closet
Another option is to store books and supplies in a hall closet. You may only need a shelf or two. The supplies can be placed in open bins or baskets to easily transfer from the closet to the dining room.
4. Baskets or Bins
Depending on the amount to school supplies you have, you may be able to keep all of your homeschooling items in a couple of baskets that you keep in the corner of the room.
We actually use a combination of the set ups listed above. I’ll explain in the rest of our tour. So let’s Jump in!
Homeschool set up in the dining room
At first glance, this just looks like a dining room. However, it is also my office (see the blue desk peeking in the corner) and our homeschool space.
The pencil jar always stays on our dining room table, and there is a small crate shelf which holds my kids books, lesson plans, and craft supplies. Next to the shelf is also a basket full of books that my kids like to read or have read to them.
The top shelf holds my 3rd grader’s current school books, his writing journal, his current chapter book, and a basket with craft supplies that both of my kids use daily.
My 3rd grader uses the LifePac Curriculum (affiliate link). It comes in boxes with 10 workbooks per subject. He only has the current workbook he is doing out on the shelf.
The other workbooks are kept in their boxes in the hallway closet.
The craft supply basket holds 3 mason jars with markers and colored pencils. There is also glue, stamps, a box of crayons, a pencil sharpener, and rulers.
I only keep the things they use on a daily basis in this basket. They also have paint supplies that are kept in the hallway closet because they don’t use the paints regularly.
On the bottom shelf of the crates is a grey notebook which holds our homeschool planner, calendar time, reading warm-up activities, and notebook paper.
Next to that is my daughter’s kindergarten alphabet games in a folder. The yellow folder holds her worksheets and lesson plan for the week.
She is currently using the free version of The Good and the Beautiful’s kindergarten language arts and math.
We also hold some of our supplies in some drawers of a small table in the living room. The first drawer holds some of our math items: flashcards, multiplication books, counters, headphones, and letter tiles.
We don’t use these every day, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.
The other drawer holds things for our writing time each day: homemade journals and a cup of writing prompts. We spend 30 minutes a day doing writing at the dining room table.
The kids pull a writing prompt out of the cup and write a sentence and draw a picture to go with it. They love this time of day! While they do their writing, I work here on the blog.
Even though we homeschool in the middle of our dining room every day, you would never know. I like that homeschooling doesn’t take over our whole dining room.
It’s easy to put everything up each day when we are done.
I hope this post has given you inspiration as you set up your homeschool. You don’t have to have a separate room to teach your kids. You can absolutely use what you have!
