Homeschool Book Organization
Before I was a mother and while I was in college studying to be a teacher I made my husband drive over an hour to get a bunch of used children’s books that someone online was selling….and I’m going to say that is where our home library first began. But, at that time, and even into my first years of motherhood and homeschooling - I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. Children’s literature was my very favorite class I took in college, but as I started gathering books it never occurred to me I was building a home library. Over the years, we’ve been shuffling books around in all sorts of places…like just a few weeks ago…I had books in five different rooms. Which, really, it was fine, but I have wanted all - well, most - our books in one place for SO long and we finally made it happen!
The Ideal Set-Up
Some of you know we built our own house and every once in a while some one will message me about homeschool room set ups and what I wish I would’ve done differently when we built. So, I’ll just take this opportunity to say now that we’ve lived in our home for 8 years and homeschooled almost 5 of those years - I think an ideal set up is to have a homeschool room on your main floor right off or near the kitchen because there is always just so much going on in this part of the home. And, again this isn’t always feasible for everyone, but just in an ideal world, I would have built a library room right next to or across from our main homeschool room - or allowed for a big wall space in the living room for just books (which we do have - but it has an upright piano on it).
One of my best friends is building right now and when you walk into her home she is going to have her school room right off to the left and a library (that actually connects to the kitchen) on the right before you walk into the rest of their house. I love their set up and I think it is going to work really well. Of course, you don’t have to have any of this to homeschool. I’ve seen some of the most darling homes that put bookshelves in their main dining areas and do formal learning right where they eat every day. There are some really creative solutions out there. I also know homeschoolers who don’t hold onto books and just use the library and that totally works too! It’s really a personal preference though…this is just what I would do if I could do it over again.
Our Space
Our school room actually has a great wall I could line with bookshelves, but I love our learning shelf, our timeline, and art display and didn’t want to let that go. I actually wouldn’t be surprised that once all my kids are older if we replaced that wall with just tall bookshelves. Meanwhile, we decided to move a dresser that we didn’t really use out of master bedroom and line one of our walls in there with three 7 shelf Billy bookshelves from IKEA. Our master bedroom is on the main floor - right off our living room. We also have an upstairs bonus room that I considered turning into just a library, but I’ve found I just really need to have all my books close. Plus, we tried some of the books up there and they just didn’t get read or put away as often as the ones that were always really close to our main living areas. I was worried I wouldn’t love having the books in my room. I like it to feel peaceful and not cluttered in there - but I actually LOVE having them in there. They’re easily accessible and books bring me a lot of joy so seeing them displayed makes me so happy. And the kids cuddle up and read on my bed or on a chair we have in my room all the time now. It’s been a great solution.
The main benefit of having a central location for all our books is that it’s really easy for me and the kids to find a book we’re looking for AND also to put it back. Each book as a home now! Unfortunately, three shelves probably really isn’t enough space - they’re already pretty full, but I’ve had to learn to be more selective in what I purchase and to try to borrow more. Fortunately, I have two neighbors who also homeschool and have large home libraries so usually between the three of us (and the library) we do pretty well. I’m always texting my neighbor and asking if she has a book before I buy it, haha! I do have some other over flow spaces we’ll eventually probably have to use and naturally we will simplify books in other areas as my younger kids out grow them.
Book Organization
Okay, on to how we organize! I’ve organized our books like this since very early on. Even though we had them spread out all over the house they were still always grouped together like this:
Board Books: All of these are going to be baby, toddler, pre-school, and early elementary friendly books.
Picture Books: I don’t try to organize any of our books by author or type because I know my kids will never put them all back in the right place so instead I organized from tallest to smallest so they can more easily put it back where it belongs. I also have a whole shelf for our Piggie and Gerald (and Dr. Seuss) books because they’re a classic favorite in our home. In fact, they’re definitely the most read and re-read books in our house.
I purposely kept our board books and picture books on the bottom shelves so it’s easy for my younger kids to access.
Science & Math Books: I also included anything STEAM related here. I keep sets together, but again I don’t necessarily try to keep them organized by specific subject. If we have a certain unit coming up, like say, human body, I can quickly browse through a few shelves and find all our human body books as long as they're relatively close. I have very few math books so I just know about where they are on the shelf. Since my science books were also my tallest this is the one shelf I have adjusted taller than many of the others. So, I did throw a random oversized book or two in here simply because they’re so tall.
I have a lot more reference type science books, but for stories - I love the science books from The Good & The Beautiful (linked below).
History Books: I don’t really have enough history books to organize by time period (we utilize the library a lot for history books). So, again, I just did it by size here, but if I did I would organize them in 4 time periods: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern Age, and Modern to Current Events. I may also have an American History section, but right now I keep a lot of those books in my monthly rotations (see below). This is also where I keep our geographical and atlas-type books.
Fairytales, Nursery Rhymes, and Poetry: I grouped all these together because I only have a few books of each and just organized by size. I put them right in the middle because they’re some of my favorites. I also put some bookmarks, our reading journals - we have two: Our Read-Aloud Family Journal and For The Love of Books which is what my twins use to log their books, and our book stickers that we use in our journals in this central space.
Because I know someone will ask - the white & rainbow set is called My Book House and it is a collection of children’s literature stories from the early 1900’s. They can only be found thrifted or second-hand on E-bay.
Church/Religious Books: I debated just keeping these mixed in with our picture books, but ultimately decided to give them their own category because I do pull these off the shelf pretty intentionally for our devotionals and I really like to be able to quickly reference them.
Leveled Readers: These are organized by reading level beginning with the very early beginner reader books (with the exception of my Bob books since they’re in bigger cases). Since there are a lot of these tiny books - I didn’t really want them down where my boys could get into them because I thought they’d just get all mixed up. Alternatively, I kept them higher and put a book bin down on their level and just brought down books for their current reading level and so far that’s worked really well. Since my youngest son (4) doesn’t have a lot of books he can read, but he’s showing a lot of interest - I just keep his books off to the side of the bin and my older son’s books (7) are in the bin. Often times at night I’ll say go grab one of your readers and they know exactly where to look now.
The Dash Into Learning readers are also some of my very favorites. I love their sets 1-3 and decodable poetry books. We’ve also used their emotional resiliency program which is fantastic. Code HCL15 will get you 15% off on any of their products.
The Good and The Beautiful Books: I have my TGTB science books in our science section, but I have the rest of the leveled readers organized by level all grouped together under my other readers. They’re so pretty and I love them!
Early Chapter Books: I have about 3 shelves with early to intermediate chapter books and I just organized them by sets or size or cover type (like paperback or hardback.)
Chapter Books: On our top shelves I kept some of the more advanced chapter books, hardback books, or ones my kids won’t use for a while - as well as some other random fiction books I had.
Monthly Rotating Seasonal and Holiday Books: I have two shelves for these books and they’re all organized by month.
Mom & Dad Books: These are spread out all around our house. We have a few on our shelves in our main living room - some in our nightstands. But, most of them are in our basement on another bookshelf (one my husband built us when we were first married). This is where we keep a lot of our other chapter books, personal development, church, and family books. I also have an entryway console that I keep some of my parenting, homeschool, and family books in - usually the ones I reference more regularly.
Keeping Track of Books
The last thing I wanted to mention was that for Christmas I gifted my girls (but, really, it was also for me, haha) this cute book stamp. I knew we were getting ready to shift our books around and thought it would be a great time to stamp all our books. The thing that I love about this stamp is you can personalize it to say whatever you’d like. I chose “From The Library of The Shepherd Family.” As we moved each book into the new shelves, my kids loved stamping them. And now, when we lend them out it also has our name in them!
Last, but not least, I am guilty of buying a few doubles so I’ve been working on scanning each book into Book Buddy which is an app (I paid for it) that allows you to scan in your books so you can keep track and categorize every book you own. It’s a much slower process to get caught up, but once we have it all updated and as our library only continues to grow, I think it’ll be really helpful to have.
This little space has definitely become a happy place of mine and I think we’ll just continue to love it. I hope this was helpful and let me know if you have any questions.
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