Our Learning Room - New and Improved!

I've been hard at work all summer; moving furniture, cleaning closets, sifting through the detritus that accumulates in the bottom of desk drawers after a year of homeschooling. All this in an attempt to spruce up our learning room- and it is finally coming together! I am very pleased with the results- I love to spend time in there, and I hope the kids will too! So without further ado here is the virtual tour:

This is the view from the door. I'll start at the left and work my way around the room...

This is the History/Geography Center. The poster is a timeline I just got from Rainbow Resource, it is laminated so that we can write/draw on it with dry-erase markers or post little pictures of people and events we are studying in history. The top shelf holds a globe, president flash cards, coins of the world, our flag collection from Flagline, a blue basket with postcards we receive (the kids like to find the places on the wall map) and some land form cards. The next three shelves hold a puzzle map, more 3-part cards (continents and oceans), geography and history reference books and the felt map and toob animals. I am planning to change out some of these activities with things I store in my rotation closet, to keep our learning fresh throughout the school year.

The bottom three shelves are Jameson's Baby Zone, soon to be upgraded to Toddler Zone!

To the right of History/Geography we have our beautiful new desk/table, which perfectly seats four - 3 kids plus me! It also features a nifty drawer for storing pens, rulers, the kid's individual dry-erase boards, and all those tiny pieces of paper Mary Gabriella cuts up for me each day. On the wall behind it you can see the print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers Reagan scored at the neighbor's garage sale, and the image of Our Lady and Jesus which is one of the prints from my Art Masters Enhance Religion collection that I plan to rotate with the liturgical season. And of course our new magnetic dry-erase board with Monday's date written on it- all ready to be copied by eager students on the first day of homeschool. On the table are a pencil sharpener and the kid's color coded pencil/marker boxes. Under the table are their color-coded bins for books and papers, and a three drawer cart for my teacher supplies.

Moving on, we have the Geometry cabinet and next to that is the Language Center. The top shelf has a paper stacker with different kinds of paper- lined for writing (in Kindergarten and 3rd grade rule), blank, and an empty shelf for "special" kinds of paper that I will rotate throughout the year, such as tracing and story paper. Also on the top shelf are the sandpaper letters and the colored pencils in their coded holders from Alison's Montessori. The next shelf down holds my copywork box, sight word flash cards and the Handwriting without Tears manipulatives. Beneath that is the magnetic alphabet and an envelope of pink reading cards (pink being the Montessori color scheme for 3 letter phonetic words), and three sound boxes. And beneath that are the plastic "metal" insets for tracing in preparation for writing. I made those stands the insets are propped on out of foam core board following directions provided by Eleanor on the 4REAL Montessori forum - thanks Eleanor!

Next is the Science Center! These shelves are fairly empty but will definitely be filled up with various hands-on materials to aid the children's exploration of Zoology, Botany, Earth Science, and Astronomy. On top you see our nature box surrounded by various nature finds- a dead grasshopper, numerous Cicada shells, a basket of polished rocks. The things with plastic cups hanging off are our anemometers for measuring the wind- I am planning to provide weather observation pages to encourage the kids to keep weather journals where they can record readings from the thermometer, rain gauge and other weather happenings. Also on the shelves are a set of toob animal (mammals) and matching cards, the DK Animal Encyclopedia, a model of the inside of the Earth, and our World Book Encyclopedia for research of course. You can also see the mailing envelopes with more activities inside ( I won't go into those now, since this tour is long enough!), stored in file holders.

Moving around (past the rotation closet) we have the Sensorial and Math Shelf. The top has the bead chains and colored bead bars, next shelf has the base 10 materials and Trinomial and Binomial Cube. Then we have number boxes, sandpaper numbers and 100 chart. The bottom two shelves are Sensorial: cylinders, touch boards, pink tower and brown stair. Oh and some Mommy its a Renoir! cards. The file holder to the left has envelopes with math activities. These shelves will be rotated frequently also.And finally here is the piano which is out of tune and no one except Ryan knows how to play- but hopefully that will change as Avery is expressing interest in learning to play. On the piano we also keep our CD player and CD's, our mini Mass kit and some composer flash cards. Under the piano are instruments and the box of Geography landforms. On the wall you can see the US map (the world map hangs above the Language Center) and to the right a print of Raphael's Madonna of the Chair, the painting that Maria Montessori said should adorn all Montessori schools. She writes:
“The little ones may not be able to understand
the symbolic meaning of the Madonna of the Chair,
but they would see in it something greater
than the other pictures which show
fathers, mothers, grandparents, and babies.
They would enfold it in their hearts with religious feelings.”

I found this quote and more great information about Montessori's devout faith at JMJ Publishing.

Which brings us back to where we started. This concludes our tour...

Oh! I almost forgot- here on the windowsill are the kids' new plants- they each chose one from the nursery to be their own school plant to care for and learn about. The boys chose the spiky cacti (they love to poke themselves on the spines)- and I actually picked the green foliage plant for Mary Gabriella who wasn't along at the store. Her eyes lie up when I showed it to her! She has since helped me transplant it and made the observation that the roots "look like worms!"

So there it is- now hopefully we can keep it tidy! I want to thank all the ladies at the 4REAL Montessori forum for inspiring me! I'd like to name names but I know I'd forget someone, I spent a lot of time surfing blogs to glean room set-up ideas. Bring on the school year!