I have always loved books. When I was in the fourth grade, I recall walking through the hallway at Ocean Crest Elementary to the library and passing by a table strewn with books marked discard. I spent my entire recess browsing the titles and selecting several to call my own.
A few of the titles were old textbooks and I would drag these from home to school for weeks. In my mind I was the teacher; I’d play school in the library during noon recess.
This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more details.
To this day I can not resist a used book sale. My kids have to drag me past the shelves of donated books and discards each time we visit our public library. I love finding classics and it pains me to find titles I have loved tossed away. My favorite discovery, however, are old biology textbooks. “You’ve lost it, Mum,” my daughter will say in her best British accent. “We have no space for more books.”
We’ve been gradually downsizing. When we first started homeschooling in 2007, we lived in a 2000 square foot home. Today, our home is just under 1600. Not a tiny house by any means but everything indeed has its place. I spent a couple of days prior to our move purging our library – I sold much of the homeschool curriculum and donated what didn’t sell.
I am delighted that the iHomeschool Network decided to hold a linkup sharing a peek at the bookshelves of several homeschooling families, because our recent move has enabled us to not only purge but also organize our collection of books. . I was excited to work with our whole crew to share our shelves.
When we were house hunting and found this house, I knew immediately that what was likely intended as a pantry would become our library. In addition to the majority of my books, this is also where many of our manipulatives and homeschool resources are stored. My scrapbooks, our high school yearbooks, and my genealogy notebooks are also home here. You’ll also find boxes of philatelic material and our nature outing gear on the floor in the corner.
As you can see in the video, I’ve attempted to organize the shelves to a degree. The materials I access most regularly are on the shelves that are accessible upon entering. The scrapbooks and materials utilized less regularly tucked in the back.
Games are lightweight so I’ve opted to put them up top, leaving the floor for our baskets – where the materials we use on a daily basis are organized. While everything might look orderly today, the library does tend to get cluttered as we have the habit of piling things up in there to give the appearance of order outside it.
We no longer have a dedicated office. Thus our desktop computer is in one corner of the master bedroom. Just to the left is my husband’s bookshelf (pictured upper left) which also provides storage space for printer paper, ink, and software.
In the living room, a shelf displays field guides, binoculars, our photobooks, and a few jars of sand, shells, and other mementos from our travels (pictured upper right). The shelves pictured on the bottom of the collage showcase Jeffrey’s (left) and Geneva’s (right) own collections.
You can tell in just a glance that Jeffrey is not as avid a reader as his sister. He loves audio books though, which we borrow from the library, Audible
We use Goodreads to keep track of what we’ve read, and, sometimes, what we’re in the process of reading. I definitely would love to invite you to follow us!
The bloggers at iHomeschool Network are showing off our bookshelves and our book organization methods. Take a peek into our madness.