Organizing Homeschool Supplies

Have you every looked at pictures of other people’s perfectly organized school rooms and had to wipe the drool off your keyboard?  There are some people who have amazing school rooms with custom designed desks for each student, wall-to-wall book shelves, special computer areas, and you name it, someone has probably built it.  I’ve even seen a neat little storage unit specifically for school supplies that has wheels and rotates.

If you have perfectionist tendencies like I do, sometimes it’s hard to look at all those “perfect” school rooms.  A perfectionist may struggle at times to do anything if she can’t do it perfectly. This is not meant to be a post about overcoming schoolroom envy, but I do hope to share some ideas to help you better organize your homeschool supplies.

Declutter!

The first step in organizing anything is to declutter. It’s silly to try to organize clutter.  If you don’t use it, get rid of it.

 Storage should be near where you use the item.

If you do most of your schooling in the kitchen, try to find storage space NEAR the kitchen. (That doesn’t mean the kitchen table!)

In our current home, we use the kitchen table, the dining room table, and the living room for our school rooms. All of those rooms serve other functions during the rest of the day, so I don’t want them set up as permanent school rooms.

This baker’s rack is in the corner of our dining room. If you look under the baker’s rack, there is a small box for my 2 older children’s school work. In the box is a notebook with their weekly assignment sheets and any worksheets for the week. The notebook has a zippered pouch to keep pencils, etc. In addition, their math workbooks, English texts and workbooks and Greek workbooks are in their boxes. Every morning, they each pull out their box, take it to their table and begin their work. I also have my teacher’s manuals on the bottom shelf. I used to keep them on the bookshelves in the basement, but I found that if they weren’t right there, then I put off grading their work and it began to pile up.

Be creative with storage containers.

It is not necessary to have perfectly matched beautiful baskets to store all your homeschool supplies. (Though I know if would be pretty.) Think of the items that need storing and try to think of low or no-cost storage solutions.

I have become quite nuts about reusing “trash” to store things. I remind myself of my grandmother. I store my teacher’s manuals in a display box from an office store. It was empty and I asked them if I could have it. They probably thought I was crazy, but it keeps my manuals together and keeps them from falling down.

I keep the rest of our supplies that are not used daily on the bookshelves downstairs. I have re-used a variety of containers to store supplies. The top of the book shelves have our art supplies. I used large strawberry baskets to store paint, glue, and clay. I have small coffee canisters to store scissors, markers, crayons, and other odds and ends. I also use a lot of plastic shoeboxes for storage. They are a good size and they stack well. They are not free, but are inexpensive. I use them for more art supplies and science supplies. I’ve also used them to organize many of the kids’ toys.

As you can tell, it’s not beautiful. But it is organized.

My last tip is:

Start small.

Don’t overwhelm yourself designing a perfectly organized homeschool area with all your books color-coded, and shelves labeled. Organize one area first and work to develop habits to keep it organized. When you’ve got everything organized, then maybe you’ll want to take the time to label it and buy matching baskets. At least then you’ll know what baskets you need, and where you want to put them.

I’ve got a lot more I could organize. I find that I am learning to evaluate how much I need something to be reorganized versus my desire to do something different. I am learning to be content without beautiful baskets and a label maker!

By Kristen H.