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Some families convert their dining room, a basement room, or an extra bedroom into a formal classroom, complete with desks, shelves, globe, and flag. Surplus school desks are often available through school districts, or families may prefer either several small tables or one large one instead. A computer or a VCR and television can be useful additions.

Other families opt to provide their kids with desks in their own rooms, leaving them the option of working there or somewhere in the common areas of the house. Or each child might have a plastic milk crate or file box to stash schoolbooks and supplies, so that all school materials can be easily found and moved wherever needed.

Unschooling families and those using some type of unit studies, in which materials are often shared among everyone in the family, generally prefer to have everything where the whole family has easy access. A good-size, sturdy table in the family room, along with an old dresser for storing craft supplies, are common sights in these homeschoolers’ houses, along with lots of boxes and bins and tubs for Lego blocks and other toys. And no homeschooling family ever seems to have anywhere near enough shelf space for books.

Housekeeping and Other Complications of Daily Life

New homeschoolers are often startled when they first arrive at a support group meeting held at the home of an experienced homeschooler. They walk in to see a spotless house, with books and magazines carefully organized and shelved, toys sorted by types and carefully stored in bins. They marvel to see no signs of dirty dishes waiting to be washed or laundry waiting to be folded. They immediately wonder what they are doing wrong and despair of ever learning to cope with all the tasks that need doing every single day. How do experienced homeschoolers manage it all?

Basically, we don’t.

We are the people whose kids ask, when they see the vacuum cleaner out, “Who’s coming for company?” Like everybody else, we run the dishwasher when we are out of clean dishes, we wash the windows (maybe) when we can no longer see through them, and we’re happy when there’s a path clear of small, pointy plastic toy parts through the living room. Nine times out of ten, the experienced homeschooler’s home will have been cleaned up especially for that support group meeting, which was the perfect excuse for getting it back into manageable shape.

Whatever your homeschooling style, there is one incontrovertible fact about homeschooling: Your kids are home for most of the day every day. Even with outside lessons, Scouts, field trips, sports, and outdoor play, your kids will be at home far more hours than schooled kids, and your house will show the effects of their presence. As we homeschoolers often tell each other with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, our houses look lived in.

Here are a few things you can do to keep your surroundings bearable:

Make it clear among the entire family that keeping the house livable is everyone’s job. Everybody lives in the house, the family is a cooperative enterprise, and everybody needs to work together to make it function. With everybody pitching in at the same time, the worst chores are less like drudgery and get done quickly. Even the smallest children can help in some way, and letting them get into the habit while they are still young enough to want to help is worth the extra time and energy it takes.

Try frequent short bursts of straightening and cleaning. Small children, especially, enjoy making a game of seeing how much they can get cleaned up in a quick five- or ten-minute drill. A couple of short drills each day can help keep the creeping clutter at bay.

Become a devotee of container housekeeping. Baskets, clear plastic bins with lids, and file boxes on casters are endlessly useful for keeping things sorted and stored. Having Lego bins, a Barbie basket, a crayon tin or art box, and so on, makes clearing up clutter a matter of scooping items into the proper containers and getting the containers back to their shelves or under