How to Prepare your Home for Homeschooling

Now that you have decided to homeschool your kids, you are likely looking around your home trying to figure out how and where you will fit in your homeschooling activities. Your homeschooling friends may have a room dedicated to homeschooling, others homes may be taken over completely. Here are some tips you can use to prepare your home for homeschooling without losing all control of your home.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Observe the way your children currently use the home. Determine where they like to read, where they do their homework, and where they toss their stuff. If you plan your homeschooling activities centered on how it is most likely to be used, you will have less cleaning and training to do.
2. Carve out an area for yourself. You will be surprised at how much paperwork you will have to do as a result of homeschooling. Therefore, you will need to carve out an area to store materials you need and to complete paperwork and do homeschool related planning. This space can be in a spare bedroom, or in a corner of your dining room, living room, or bedroom.
3. Create a storage system for the kids. Children tend to work wherever they are most comfortable. This may mean hanging upside down on a sofa, or crawling under the dining room table with a blanket. Occasionally they will use a table and chair. For this reason, I would forgo creating a designated workspace for the child and instead supply a basket or shelving system for their items where they would normally just toss their stuff.
4. Allow older children, preteen and up, a bit of space in their room for privacy and sanity reasons. Once kids hit puberty you will find that they just need to be alone with their thoughts from time to time. If they have siblings just the act of that other person breathing will annoy them. For this reason, I like to give kids age 10 and up a desk area in their bedroom. I am not saying that this is where I want to child to complete all of their work, I just like to give them the option to pull away if they need to.

Tips & Warnings

• Put comfort before function allowing the children to freedom from desks and chairs.
• Create an area for organizing books and materials.
• Create an area for mom to work in to facilitate homeschooling.
• Do not turn a dark dank basement room that no one wants to be in into a homeschooling room. You can however use it for a room for those messier projects.