This week on the podcast, we are talking about how to design your homeschool room (well, really, any room in the house, but I'm using our homeschool space as the example).

 Now, this is not going to be how to make it really beautiful - yet - I'm going to talk functional. If you remember, we talked a few weeks ago about the four phases of designing a home that supports you, and I'm in step 3 in our homeschool space. 

3 Steps to Design A Functional [Homeschool] Space

1. Decide what you want to do for your homeschool and the best space in your home to do it.

2. Remove everything that doesn't belong - leave only necessary curriculum, books, and materials

3. Make what you do need easy to access and store items where you will use it

We do a classical Charlotte Mason education and school in a few places around the house: around the kitchen table, in the kids' bedrooms (for one on one work with mom), and in our school room. 

I used to keep ALL of our homeschool materials in the school room (we are talking 6 years worth now), but I found that it was waaaay too hard to get to the things we needed each day. It was like having to decide over and over again what we wanted to do and when we wanted to do it. 

Now in our school room, each child has a shelf on it with all of their materials they use in that room: a box with two pencils, an eraser, and a pencil sharpener so that they are always able to write; a basket with their handcraft materials (currently knitting); and a few binders to organize all of their subjects. We have a shelf with resources for family subjects (nature study, history, Spanish and French, drawing, and poetry) and a globe. A table and nugget couch complete that space where we read, narrate, and write. Upstairs I keep their math and reading in our linen closet (above the towels and medicine), so it is easy to access for their independent work.

Listen in as I pull back the curtains about what we're doing and how we got there to hopefully give you some ideas about how to set up any room in your house.