Today I want to show you how to organize your homeschool in your dining room without having your dining room looking like a full classroom! Tomorrow I will show you how I organized our homeschool resources in our living room. So don’t miss part 2 of this blog post!

You can organize your homeschool space anywhere with these 7 tricks I’m sharing with you today.

Welcome to our home and to our homeschool space, after all, our HOMEschool happens where life happens the most in our home daily, in our living space!

Organize Your Homeschool

I will start showing you how we organize our homeschool resources around our dining room table because this is where we spend most of our learning time.

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Here are my best tricks to organize your homeschool room without looking ugly!

This is not the best picture quality but it gives a good idea of how our dining room looks like even though we have an IKEA Kallax packed with homeschool books in it. I wanted to make sure I had a nice map and plenty of blackboards and whiteboards to work with without making this space look bad.

1 – Organize your homeschool space with beautiful boards!

So here are the solutions I found: use beautiful black or whiteboards you can put away if you need to!

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I found this gorgeous blackboard at Michaels and I was so blessed to buy two for the price of one in one of their BOGO’s sale! I love them! Note that none of my boards are fixed on the wall. I can simply put them away in our entrance closet if I need to.

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I use one to write the memory verse we are learning to memorize for the week, and the second one to write the habit from Laying Down The Rails we’ve been working on along with a short poem we are memorizing.

I love my boards but let’s talk about the map on the wall! I love our map! This is a peel and stick map I bought on Amazon and stuck over a frame I bought at Michaels for $19 bucks. I stuck the map over the glass, did not even bother doing anything else to it. This map is also a “write on it” with dry-erase markers, it is perfect for our homeschool space!

Organize Your Homeschool Space

Below our map, you can see a large whiteboard tucked in on the side of our IKEA Kallax. I take it out when I need, use it, clean it and put it away when I’m done.

Now I have to show you this board on your left!

I was looking for something specifically for our All About Spelling letter tiles. Again, this is our dining room and I don’t want to look exactly like a classroom so I wanted some pretty, stylish and easy to put away when we are not using it. That’s when I found this magnetic board at Michaels for only $11! The middle was not a blackboard so I bought the chalkboard paint and painted it. Look how perfect this is!

Now enough with the boards. Let’s take a look at what I have in this bookcase!

2 – Organize your homeschool space with a nice bookcase!

Organize Your Homeschool Space

Top right is where I keep all my kid’s readers for our curriculum. I keep only what I am using this year for our homeschool upstairs is in this bookcase. Everything else we are not using stays in our formal homeschool room downstairs. Yes, we have a nice homeschool room we only use as storage! LOL

What this bookcase holds:

3 – Organize your homeschool room with baskets, boxes, and Mason jars!

Here is a peek inside the two IKEA white baskets.

organize your homeschool

And here is a closer look at our books.

organize your homeschool

Now let me show you my two favorite things over the bookcase! 🙂

  • Mason Jars for Homeschool Organization | Mason jars are amazing for organizing your pens, pencils and markers!
  • organize your homeschool
  1. (LEFT) I bring this wooden basket to the table every morning and keep it in the center so the kids have access to their pens, pencils, and markers easily. I bought this wooden basket at Michaels on sale for $8! You can find gorgeous ones here. And look how pretty these Mason jars look! You can even find beautiful colorful Mason jars on Amazon for sale.
  2. (RIGHT) This Revolving Desktop Carousel Organizer is amazing! Worth every penny. I waited until it was on sale to buy it using a coupon as well! Double blessing! 😀

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4 – Use every bit of space to organize your homeschool well!

Well, let’s now jump to the other side of our dining room where there is more to see!

organize your homeschool

We keep this desktop computer exclusively for the kids’ homeschool online lessons. This is where they do their CTC Math online lessons, French and Spanish online courses from PetraLingua, Piano Wizard Academy, our InquisiKids Discover & Do Science DVDs, watch Jelly Telly, read books on Epic and more! Sometimes they also use the iPads or Kindle Fire for these too.

5 – Organize your homeschool with workboxes!

Besides our computer desk, I keep my workbox system! Check out Kristi Clover’s Ultimate Homeschool Organization eCourse and Amy Michael’s Thrive Homeschooling Academy to learn more about workboxes.

This is how I’ve been using it for the past 2 years and love it. It is very simple. I only have one workbox for all 3 kids and I divided my drawers by subjects. I follow the same order we use in our homeschool routine for our Sonlight Core, then Language Arts.

organize your homeschool

We’re finishing Core B with a 1st grader and a 2nd grader, and I have a kindergartener starting Core P4/5 soon. You can check out our full kindergarten curriculum here.

So from top to bottom here is our workbox organization :
1 – Bible
2 – Read aloud books we are reading at the moment
3 – History & Geography we are reading this week
4 – Science
5 – B’s Language Arts 2 + readers he is currently reading
6 – H’s Language Arts 1 + readers she is currently reading
7 – All About Spelling 1
8 – All About Spelling 2
9 – Ariella’s ABCs
10 – Ariella’s 123s.

As you noticed, there are no Math drawers in our workbox because we do CTC Math online, so we have no Math books! Halleluyah!

6 – Organize your homeschool using not so obvious spaces in your room to store key resources!

And finally, my small white hidden bookcase under our breakfast bar!

organize your homeschool

This is a small bookcase but if fits perfectly hid in this corner. I store some extra books and resources we use for notebooking and lapbooking, our digital programs like Petra Lingua and Piano Wizard, our Little Passport little luggage filled with geography lessons from all over the world, some DVDs including Times Tales and our Cardboard VR!

7 – Organize your homeschool with binders!

I have binders galore in our homeschool space. They are fabulous to keep your resources and lessons organized. Each child has their own binder. All their Sonlight curriculum are in binders as well organized by weeks. Every week I transfer their weekly lessons to their binders so they know exactly what to do for that week, and I organized the lessons by day from Monday to Friday. Once the lesson is completed I transfer it to another binder to be stored.

I also love using binders for my own homeschool organization and sanity! I keep my Homeschool Mom Life Binder and my The Organized Homeschool Life book I printed and keep as a binder always handy.

Well, this is it!

Check out our homeschool in action here!

For more awesome homeschool and homeschool organization ideas, follow me on Pinterest!

I hope you had enjoyed touring my dining room and peeking into every detail of how I organized my homeschool in our dining room. This is only part 1 of this blog post. Next, check out how I organized our homeschool in our living room and you will even peek at the principal’s office!

Also, check out the other posts in this series.

Day 2 – Our Organized Homeschool Space – The Musings of Mum
Day 3 –  6 Homeschool Curriculum Organization Hacks – Lil Mama Homeschool
Day 4 – How to Organize Your Digital Homeschool Files – Thrive Homeschooling
Day 5 – How to Organize Your Small Homeschool Space – Deliberate Homeschooling
Day 6 – How I Organize Our Homeschool Room – Ranching with Kids
Day 7 – How To Create A Toddler Proof Homeschool Space – Making Her Mama
Day 8 – Homeschool Organization With Or Without A School Room – Plum Cheeky Solutions
Day 9 – An Organized Space for Unorganized Homeschooler – Unhurried Home
Day 11 – Organizing Our Relaxed Homeschool – Bethany Ishee

Homeschool Organization eBook

Your turn: Are you homeschooling in your dining room area?

How are you organizing your space? I love love to hear your ideas on how to organize your homeschool space in your dining/living room!

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About Ana Willis

Ana is the unhurried homeschool mom of 3, wife, and homeschool blogger. She loves to encourage, inspire and empower moms to go from stressed to blessed by providing them with the tips, strategies, and resources they need to succeed. Ana is the founder of They Call Me Blessed and the creator of: Hebrew for Homeschoolers, Charlotte Mason Online Conference, The Homeschool Sisterhood, and the Beyond Blessed Life Planner. She leads a vibrant free community for homeschool moms on Facebook and you can connect with her at www.facebook.com/theycallmeblessedblog.