Daniel Catt via Compfight

Whether you have an entire room devoted to homeschooling or your kitchen table doubles as school space, you can make learning more fun with a little decorating creativity!

Dual-Purpose Room

If your school space doubles as another room, you’re in good company. Most families don’t have an entire extra room to devote to school, but we can still make some fun changes that will add festivity and fun to learning at home! True, we don’t really want a diagram of a human eyeball staring at us while we eat meatballs, but there are still plenty of fun things we can do. The idea is to decorate what you already have and either try to make things pretty (while helping the school supplies blend into the background a bit) or decorate with an educational theme to make your school supplies stand out. Which one you choose just depends on your personal preference.

It helps tremendously in a dual-purpose room to  have a special bookshelf devoted to school supplies and books. If you’re going with the educational theme, just choose colors that you like. To help things blend, use the colors you have already decorated with. Do you have red and white checked curtains? Buy your school supplies in red and white, then buy craft supplies to decorate containers in red and white, as well! Most of these ideas can be homemade, which gives you a great opportunity to include the kids for their “art class”!

• Bookshelf: You can buy or paint your bookshelf to coordinate with the rest of the room, or you can even use contact shelf liner in a pretty color to jazz it up!
• Binders: Buy binders with the clear plastic coverings and slide pretty paper under the plastic! This is cheap, easy and makes a big difference!
• Book Covers: Take a cue from the public schools and help your kids make book covers for any text books they might use. You can use paper bags and have the kids decorate with stamps, stickers or drawings. You could even use pretty craft paper, if you want the books to coordinate with your room!
• Containers: Use pretty baskets lined with coordinating fabric, or decorate your own containers with an educational theme. This divided container will hold pencils, pens, markers and paintbrushes! Get creative with ways to decorate containers and make the space fun and pretty! (Instructions will be posted on Creative Christian Mama this Friday, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!)
  
• Chalkboard: Make your own chalk board for the kids to practice writing or math! This is another fun craft project they can help with. This one is large enough to provide plenty of surface area, but it’s small enough to store on end in a bookshelf! (Instructions here!)
  
• Fabric-Covered Magnetic Board: Above the bookshelf, hang a magnetic board for keeping important papers visible. Buy educationally-themed fabric or fabric that goes with your table cloth or curtains and make one of these with your kids! (Learn how to make one, here!)
  
• Picture Frames: Put several of these on top of the bookshelf to display photos of “field trips” that the kids enjoyed. That will help them to remember how much fun learning can be! (Learn how to make them!)
  
• Room Divider: If you have the space and would like to simply hide the school supplies when you aren’t using them, consider buying a simple room divider to put in front of the bookshelf. On the “school side” you can hang school-related items, or even small containers for organization. On the “room side” you can add pretty material or paint the divider.

Separate Homeschooling Room

Lucky you! If you have a room devoted to homeschooling, you can implement all of the above ideas, plus these other ones…

• Wall Hangings: Use sticky-tack, tape or pushpins to hang maps, graphs, charts, posters or any other educational papers! To make them pretty, tape a border of ribbon around the edges.
• Clothes-Line: Across a wall, hang a clothes line and hang special art or school work that your kids have done! That will keep your fridge cleared off and give the kiddos a place to display their special papers.

There you have it! I hope these ideas have sparked some creativity of your own!

What is your favorite way to decorate your homeschooling area?