Written by Jamie Martin, editor of Simple Homeschool and founder of Steady Mom
Occasionally I hear those who live in small homes wishing for a bit more space.
“If only we had a bigger house, we could have our very own school room!”
Some homeschoolers arrange their basements with desks, a flag, and materials organized alphabetically on shelves. Others sprawl their learning throughout their entire home–with books, papers, and drawings here, there, and everywhere.
In our family, I’ve never really wanted a separate room for school. One of my main goals for homeschooling is for our kids to discover that learning is just a natural part of life, happening whenever and wherever we go. Setting aside one specific space for academics didn’t really match up with that goal in my mind.
Which is right for you? There’s no correct or incorrect answer, but it’s worth considering a few factors, like the size of your space and your educational philosophy.
Here are a few pros and cons of having your own school room at home:
Pros
- It may make organization easier, as there’s no confusion about where school materials belong.
- Your child has the space to create and can leave creations up longer (like puzzles, art projects, etc.) without them being in the way.
- If you or your child needs more structure, having a separate room for school may help.
- Having all your materials together in one place may make it easier to see what you have/ what you need as you plan for future years.
- A separate room may help keep distractions to a minimum.
Cons
- A separate room may segregate home and learning.
- It’s not as easy for the homeschooling parent to supervise school while doing something else (like preparing dinner or working on the house).
- It may not seem as relaxed an environment.
- Having a separate room may make it more challenging to involve the non-teaching spouse, compared to having learning materials throughout the home.
Want to know what others do?
Here are a few links I gathered from around the blogosphere of where other families do their learning:
- Brenda of The Tie That Binds Us
- Sarah of SmallWorld at Home
- Heather of Beauty That Moves
- Sarah Mae of Like a Warm Cup of Coffee
- Ann of A Holy Experience
- Mandi of Life Your Way
What about you? Do you have your own school room? If not, do you wish you did?
About Jamie Martin
Hi There,
My biggest problem with having a “formal” classroom is that I have put up all sorts of posters on the walls. It has also become the storage for my homeschooling material and school supplies. I have bookcases full of books that I need to sift through to get rid of. Just being honest.
Rebecca
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We recently moved into a larger house and have a separate school room. I love it! It’s open to our downstairs, and there are many windows, so we don’t feel at all closed in. We still read in bed, do art in the kitchen, and take work all over the house. But it sure is nice to have a space for all of our books and whiteboard, etc.
At our old house, we had one room that functioned as a living room/dining room/family room/school room. I definitely like our new place
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We’re unschoolers, but we have a classroom
We have one because, we have an extra room and:
It may make organization easier, as there’s no confusion about where school materials belong.
Your child has the space to create and can leave creations up longer (like puzzles, art projects, etc.) without them being in the way.
Though our living books are on a bookshelf in the living room.
IT’s funny though that you should mention that you want you kids to know that learning is just a natural part of life, My oldest spent 2 years in PS, and many times people have asked “did you have school today?” and he has said “no” because we didn’t use the classroom…LOL It’s cool that I have accomplished making learning fun enough he doesn’t call it “school” but it also saddens me that after only Prek and K, he equates learning with the PS model…
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Yes, I can totally see how having an extra room could work nicely no matter what your educational philosophy.
An interesting observation about your son…sounds like you’re doing a great job at home.
Love my small house for the most important types of learning: sharing, cooperating, loving, living together… skills that will take them through life. Bigger places and more stuff (we’ve had them) do not make for happier people.
We have four children, three bedrooms, an open kitchen/dining/living area, and a bathroom, and that is plenty for us. Eventually we’ll have built bookshelves on every available wall, and with that and the dining table and places to sit, we are quite content with the essentials.
Yes, we have just the right amount of space–not too much, not too little. It works great for our learning at the moment.
We have a separate room – close to the laundry, which is so large we have 3/4 for a “craft/laboratory” space – with a bathroom nearby and easy access to outside. Oh, and a fireplace.
My partner mainly works from home and we can often make a lot of noise – this just works easier. Computers, printers, books, videos and a TV for videos, a couple of cosy chairs – there is too much stimulation in the room for our DS but it is the best we can do at present.
We did not think about curricula styles – just our DS and his sensitivities combined with my husband’s needs.
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We don’t have a school room but I would love one! Space prohibits at the present time. The reasons I’d like one are really the same reasons any home would like an art studio or a study. Containment, peace, work space where we can leave things out and close the door on it until the next day occasionally, a space tailor made for the purposes intended. We’d still use such a room when the children are grown and left home, just for our own “schooling”!
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Oh and at the moment, I have five kids and one on the way in a three bedroom house with one small open living space. We use every inch of the place!
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we don’t have an official room, but i think our living room has kind of turned into our school room. while my son naps, my daughter and i sit on couch cushions on the floor around the coffee table to work on her writing and a few workbook pages or any craft we have for that day. then we curl up on the couch under a blanket with drinks and snacks to read through our stack of books (we usually have 2 or 3 short stories and we’re enjoying reading through the narnia books together just for fun). so i guess we have a school “space” instead of a room. though when the weather’s nice, we’ll do our seatwork on the balcony
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Sounds lovely, Andie!
I can’t wait to read the responses to this one!!! I have a feeling that there is no right or wrong answer!!! And this is as individual as home schools are!!! I like not having a dedicated school room, we live in our large kitchen and my “school” kids want to hang out with me and their younger siblings.
1. I like that I can carry on with, laundry, cooking and living… I think if we had a separate room I may never ever get any of our real life done!!! I like that we clean up our school and clear the table for meals – it puts some closure on our school day and I like to start our school day fresh…
2. Because our kitchen is where we do school their just isn’t room to buy more and more school paraphanalia!!! I would like a place to put up a map… no wall space and a notice board but we have come this far without them perhaps we can just keep going with what is really working for us.
This sounds very much the way we do things as well. I like hanging out in our whole house throughout the day.
We do have a school room – we call it the Atelier. It’s mostly for projects that we want to leave out, art, and other messy stuff. However, we do Bible study around the dining room table at breakfast, art masters study in the dining room, reading in the living room, and lots of stuff outside. My kids really like having the Atelier. I have it set so that they can go in and find their projects without help and I find them in there “working” all the time. It’s been a great addition to our homeschool!
We do most of our schoolwork at our dining room table, and I suspect we’d still do that if we had a “schoolroom.” I don’t necessarily want a room dedicated to school, but it would be great to have a large (or even not-so-large) closet to house all of the materials!
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We don’t have a school room. Of course, my kids are 2 and 1, so we don’t *really* have “school” just yet, lol. I do a lot of toddler/preschool activities with them but I imagine that’s just like any other SAHM, homeschooling or not.
I see both sides of it & I go back and forth about what I would like when they reach school age. On the one hand, it would be so nice to have a separate room where bigger/messier projects can happen & things can be stored. On the other hand, I want their work of learning to happen side-by-side with my work of running our home, and putting “school” in a room seems to separate the two rather than generate the sort of seamlessness between them that I am hoping for.
Right now we live in a 100-year-old 1400-square-foot rental home that has – thankfully – a really large living/dining room that lends itself well to storing things along the walls & putting a little table in the corner for their crafts & whatnot. By the time they are school-aged we likely won’t be living in this house (or even this city!) anymore, so I imagine what we do will depend upon what space is available in the house we eventually buy. My ideal dream situation is a nook or alcove of some sort off the living room or dining room that is large enough for a table and storage, but connected and open to our living area so learning can spill out of the “school” area – but who knows what we’ll end up with?
“I want their work of learning to happen side-by-side with my work of running our home.”
Beautifully said, Meghann!
We are a family of five in a 2-bedroom condo, and we do have a separate room for schooling in our finished basement. It’s closed-in, but we aren’t there all the time. We usually do circle time, storytime, time w/God upstairs on the couch. We move downstairs for craft time, history, math & phonics. It’s good to change scenery – and my 3-year-old and baby can then play in the playroom adjacent to the schoolroom, while I work with my 6-year-old.
I like having a place for my resources. It does help me with planning so that I have a place to go. The girls love it as a place to do their crafts. I think we balance having that place to go to, along with using the rest of the home.
We live in a tiny, tiny space with three kids. It’s not so much as I want a “school room” per say, but a nice space for the kids stuff in general would be heavenly! I would love to have a big shelf for arts and crafts and a table for them to get messy with and floor space to spread out.
Oh that would be wonderful!
I couldn’t quite believe it the first time I found out how small your house is, Hillary. Sounds like a challenge – I’m sure you guys make it work beautifully.
ha! if by beautifully you mean messily than you might be right
We are thankful that we have a home that is ours. Many people live with less so we feel very lucky. (But yeah, I kick things out of frustration sometimes.)
I can see both sides of it. When we homeschooled (for 8 years) we did not have room for a school room. Our living room/family room was it. I liked that it was the center of our home, other than the kitchen. Was it messy? Yep. I did make sure that we had space for everyone’s supplies and that they were put away each day, but it would’ve been nice to be able to leave some stuff out. I would’ve liked to be able to hang stuff on the walls too, but didn’t have that.
If we had a separate room, I am sure I would’ve like it, but not the thought of separating it from everything else in the family.
It really is a personal family philosphy, if one has the space, to decide what to do! And it is fun to read what everyone else is doing!
Bernice
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We have a small schoolroom-cum-sewing-cum-craft room! It is a creative space and everything is stored here. Generally, all seatwork is done here and then we may migrate to sunny places for our core study or under the tree for read alouds. Even when we didn’t have schoolroom, we had our school table where we could work and not have to pack away for meals or guests.
I do like the idea of a “creative space.” Sounds lovely!
We do have a separate school room for the time being. We have three bedrooms and our boys share a room, leaving the third for us to use for school until we add another little one to our family. Really it’s more of an art space- we do our actual schoolwork in many rooms of the house and outside, but by having the separate space our art materials are accessible, projects can be left out past dinner time, and we have wall space to really display special work.
I don’t feel like we *need* the separate space to school well or anything, but it has been nice in this season of life.
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We don’t. We use the dining room for actual “teaching time.” I have a white board hidden on one of the walls if I need to pretend I’m an actual teacher. And then, because I couldn’t stand looking at all of the kids’ JUNK, I have them store all of their workbooks and manuals they’re using in a wardrobe that I can shut the doors on. I leave books out for them to look at in the playroom. We do our read aloud time on a couch or some place cozy. That’s all we need! (We have three large bookshelves in our dining room to store all the extra books. I try to keep those presentable since they’re visible upon entering the house, so the kids have to ask me to access those. But I always say YES.)
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Love this topic – it’s so fun to see what everyone else makes work for them. We have recently moved and while we now have a room with built in book shelves to store our school supplies, we still do our school work in the kitchen and living room. For us it’s the best of both worlds, I have plenty of room to store all our paraphernalia and will hopefully soon have a place for artwork to hang on the wall, but while the kids are doing their seat work I can supervise and still do laundry, get supper started, whatever I need to do. It’s also much easier for me to keep an eye on the little ones if we’re not shut up in a school room while they’re wandering all over the house.
We do have a separate school room and (most of the time) I like it. It’s great to have a place to store things and leave art work drying, etc. During winter weeks when its really cold (which isn’t often here in GA) we move school up to the dining room. I like the fact that I can work in the kitchen, fold laundry, etc. on those days but I DON’T like the fact that whenever meal time hits, we have a bunch of stuff to clean up! Most weeks, we end up doing the bulk of our academic work downstairs in the school room and then finish things up, read, etc. either upstairs or outside.
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We have a separate schoolroom. During some seasons we use it for almost all of our schoolwork, during others it transforms into the kids’ play room and we do schoolwork at the kitchen table. Right now, using the schoolroom works for us because it keeps our toddler contained – I don’t have to constantly stop lessons to find out where she wandered off to. She has a special area set up in the schoolroom just for her toys and coloring books. The older kids spend a lot of their free time in the schoolroom also, building, drawing, reading and generally hanging out. It’s a space they enjoy being in, which is so important!
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We just moved to a house that allows us to have a separate area for homeschooling and it has helped us to be more organized. Before, we were at the dining room table, right next to the kitchen, which was nice when I was cooking, but not nice when I was cooking, but not nice when we had meals. We had to clean off the table for every meal, which was a pain.
Our new school room is in one part of our L shaped living room, so although it is separate, it is still part of the main living area. I would not recommend a school room in a basement or upstairs away from the kitchen and main living areas, it would it harder to stay there and you would have major drifting of children every time you left the room to load the dishwasher or switch a load of laundry!
I like that our books and supplies are in their own area. Although it still gets strewn about the house during the day, at the end of school time, everyone knows where to return their stuff!
We do not have a formal room but sometimes wish we did just to store all of our stuff. My husband recently built shelves to help store some of our books and supplies in the laundry area which has been a big help. Overall, I guess I like not being confined to one space but sometimes get envious when I see all these gorgeous homeschool classrooms.
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We homeschooled for 11 years and the second year we homeschooled we converted our ‘sort of’ enclosed back porch to a 13 x 22 school room. There were lots of bookshelves and a ‘study area’ for each child. It was nice to have lots of storage space and learning room-BUT-many times we just found ourselves at the dining room table, or cuddled on the couch. The schoolroom got much more use when the junior high years came and we did more cyberschooling. Now we have one in college and one in technical school-and our schoolroom is transforming into my sewing/exercise room..but we still use all those bookshelves!
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At the moment we have a “school area” in the basement but really nothing gets done there. It’s more just a space to keep some things together. We’re thinking of adding a room to the back of our house to be a sort of family room and the more I think about it the more I also want to make it our school area. It would be right off the kitchen which seems perfect to me. As has been mentioned, it’s much easier to supervise and get something done this way. (We’ve got time to figure things out though since we’re still just preschool!)
We do have a schoolroom. Most of the kids don’t actually sit in there and work. They prefer to spread out on the more comfy pieces of furniture. Those that have schoolwork on the computer have to sit in there. I”m sure if we had a school laptop, they wouldn’t. It is nice to have a room to store all our books and school supplies. We homeschooled for about 8 years without a schoolroom.
Life is much easier and more organized with a schoolroom
Linda @ Linda’s Lunacy
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We use the whole home. They do their math on their laptops (at his desk and on her bed are the preferred spots) They do co-op homework at the counter or the dining room table while I neaten, cook & do dishes around them. They journal wherever they are comfortable. We read together on the couch. Spelling is done on their laptops on spellingcity.com. Wherever they are, they don’t like to be away from me long; they do tend to gravitate to me! LOL!
All of their school stuff is kept in the bottom doors of my china cabinet. The supplies that aren’t often used (or are waiting for my youngest, who is 3 yrs old) are stored in a kitchen cupboard, up high. Our US map is a cool vintage school classroom map which is actually used as decor on my son’s bedroom wall – we find ourselves bolting to his room frequently to locate the place we’re reading about! For our World map, we use one of his vintage globes. Other than a bunch of library books lying around & the titles on my own bookshelf, I wouldn’t say it’d be evident to a visitor that we homeschool, at all.
I love reading blogs & admiring the beautiful, well-designed & highly organized homeschooling rooms. I almost always consider turning a portion of our finished basement into one for a split second but I know that we wouldn’t use it!
Ideally, I would like a “school closet” where I could store everything and just bring it out to wherever we feel like it. We don’t though and instead have an open shelf in a corner of the living room with everything on it, and an extra child sized table and chairs next to it. As much I would like closed storage for our stuff, having a designated space, that it still in the middle of our home is working out well. And I’ve always said guests can simple get over seeing our “schoolroom” when they come over, mess and all.
We do have our own school room, which slowly adapted from my home office – where the kids were spending most of their time. So I boxed up all the paper files and took my computer (all I needed) to another space, and gave the home office a makeover. This is the place where the kids can get messy (otherwise I would go insane if I saw it throughout the house), leave an unfinished project to return to later at their leisure (happens quite often as their attention span is so short), and where we can all sit around a table and work together (motivation for both Mom/Dad to leave everything aside and focus on the kids and our project).
It’s now the favorite room of the entire house – and I’m so glad we made it work for us.
We have an office/school room. It also houses our two keyboards. We don’t really do school in this room. It has lockers for the kids books and such. Bookshelves for books, toys, etc. Wall space for letter flashcards, calender, and whiteboard. It has been nice to get mostly everything into this one room. That way I don’t have to go all over the house getting materials in order. But the kids do their work at either of two kitchen tables, on the couch, or in their rooms. So I love having it just to keep things organized.
I’ve always wanted a ‘school room’ but the more I think about it, the more what I really want is a library room! A place to store books, a couple comfy places to sit, maybe a computer and a big table for projects/art (at the opposite end of the room from the books!). The actual learning can happen anywhere – in the house, outside, in the car, Starbucks… – but it’s nice to have a place to keep everything else organized!
I’ve done both — the dedicated school area and doing school at the kitchen table. I admit that having a space (not necessarily a room) is a better situation for me. I like being able to leave school things out on a table. If it’s got to be cleared for meals, it’s a real hassle.
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I also have a seperate school room. I have a split foyer house and the downstairs is a family room, play room, and laundry. So the play room is also school room. I couldnt imagine any other way since my toddler keeps himself busy with toys, while I 1on1 teach either the 8 or 6yo. Then those 2 take turns doing computer time, play time, or PBS learning time. Then in the den/family room we do group reading. BUT I school all day while cooking, in the car, so only 2 maybe 3 hours max a day are in the school room. I work hard on only books in the bedroom, the bedroom I try to keep as their places to do what they want. We’ll see if that last past a certain age.
We are blessed with our own school room. We purposely don’t use it all the time, for the same reason we don’t attend public school. We KNOW that learning happens all the time, in all sorts of situations – getting into a mindset that learning requires a certain environment is a very dangerous one, since you’ll loose so many opportunities to learn! Mostly, our school room is used for storage of our materials and lab equipment.