How Do You Keep Homeschool Stuff Organized?

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No matter how long we've been homeschooling, we are curious about how other homeschoolers do things. And homeschoolers who are newer to the game obviously have lots of questions! This series will try to answers some of the questions homeschoolers ask each other. Questions about how we handle some of the little details and about our opinions on different aspects of homeschooling. Questions that we all might answer differently because what works great in one family might not work at all in another. 

How do you keep all your homeschool books and resources and . . . stuff . . . organized?

Well, once again, my totally honest answer is that I really didn't. I mean, I tried. We always started off the year with everything neat and tidy, a place for everything, but by Thanksgiving we usually had fallen off that wagon and spent the rest of the year fighting the chaos and hoping for the best. Some years were clearly better than others. Here are the ideas that worked . . . when we stuck with them.

 A system only works when you USE it, and that was where our problems arose - we didn't use the systems I tried to set up. I finally had to admit that although I wanted everything immaculate and alphabetized and looking like a Pinterest board, those systems took too long to set up and made it too much work for us to stick with them. Simple was better. And allowing for individual styles was better too. I could organize my books the way I liked, but I had to let my students keep their books organized (or not organized!) the way they liked.

For a couple of years we had a schoolroom of sorts, so all the schoolbooks and materials were on bookshelves or on a table in that room. They weren't always organized neatly, but they were all in one place so it was relatively easy to keep track of everything.

When we converted that room to a bedroom, our central school location moved to the dining room table. I didn't have room for desks or bookshelves in the dining room, and I didn't want them there anyway. At that time we had a small bookshelf in the hall that we used for most books. The general use books were on the two lower shelves, and on the top shelf I had magazine boxes for each of the kids that held their workbooks and notebooks. The teacher editions that I used were on the desk in my room.

The next step came as the older boys did more of their schoolwork on their own, and it was just natural that they kept their schoolbooks in their rooms. It didn't take very long before the bookshelf in the hall was moved to a bedroom, each of the kids had their workbooks and such in their rooms, and all the teacher editions and the "master" books that we used when working together were in my room.

From that time on, I've had a section of my bookcase desk and a book crate beside my desk that are for Teacher's Editions and the schoolbooks that are my responsibility. Sometimes it was neat and orderly, and sometimes the books were just jumbled about. A couple years ago when I started teaching at the co-op, I designated a large totebag as my co-op bag and all my co-op books are kept in that. And it lives beside the desk too. I've had to learn to be satisfied with functional rather than striving for Pinterest-worthy beautiful. The books are all in one place, and usually I know which stack to look in.

My kids have set up their desks or work spaces in ways that (supposedly) worked for them. The photos below show the desks of the youngest two children as they were a few years ago (the last time I took pictures). My daughter's desk is barely a workspace. It's piled even higher with art supplies and random things now! She doesn't often sit at her desk to do her work, so she uses it as a catchall, with books and art supplies and who knows what else in the drawers, on top, and in a crate beside the desk. That works for her. The second picture is my son's desk. Spartan in comparison! His books were in crates beside the desk and on a computer table in the hall, and he kept only the one book he was currently working in on the desk. That worked for him.



I think it's important to give your kids the responsibility of keeping track of their own school stuff as much as possible. Start gradually turning it over to them when they are younger, so that by the time they are in high school it's part of their normal routine.

See my related posts:

End of Year Organizing, Naturally Organized - Not!, and Getting My Homeschool Organized.

How do you keep your stuff organized? Leave a comment and let me know what works for you - or leave a homeschool question you're curious about.

This post is part of the August 2019 Homeschool Collection on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.

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