Our School Room Setup

After weeks of hard work finally here is a peak at our school room.  This room is our library that is right at the front of our house.  I chose this room because I can close the door and secure it out of my curious little M's reach.  Another reason I love this room is the large window that allows so much natural light into the room.

Here is a look at the doors to the room.  As you can see I have it closed and secured using a hair band!

Here are some overview shots of the room starting counter clock wise from the door.

After you enter the room, to your right is this large shelf from Ikea that we already had.  The top shelves are for my supplies.  In the bottom left are the books that are used during school time (both D's and M's) and to the right is where I keep M's montessori works. This way when M is in the room I can contain her to this area and let her not mess with D's other shelves.

Just next to this shelf in the corner is our practical life area.  I didn't have enough shelves so had to use this end table that was sitting un-used in our basement.

For now I have this table for D placed near the big window, but we move this around the room depending on where we need the space.  This is a big Ikea table and the Ikea Chairs.  I love that the surface is white and wiping and cleaning the surface of this table is a great practical life activity for D.

The other corner in the room is our Math area.  Again, I re-used an old TV shelf for this area.  I love this TV shelf as most of the Math trays are large and this long shelf serves it right.  I had these Clock and Money Posters that I had bought in the Dollar Store a long time back and now it hangs behind this shelf. Also on the wall you can see our Large Number Cards displayed for easy access for our golden bead material work.

Right next to the Math area is our Language Area.  The bookshelf I used for this has only two shelves and kind of small, so I have the sandpaper letters and our salt tray on the floor.  On the wall above is the first finger painting from D.

This is another old TV cabinet re-purposed for the sensorial area.  Between the language and sensorial area is our bin for rugs.  On the wall above the shelf is a picture of Maria Montessori that I cut out from an old NAMTA journal.

Up next is our cultural shelves.  You can see our continent boxes on the floor.  On the wall are posters that I got for a buck at the dollar store and laminated at Lakeshore Learning.  One the other corner are two more boxes that are used for storing some of my supplies.

This is the initial setup that we are going to use to start our school with.  As time goes by we might switch things around.  I am pretty sure once M hits eighteen months there would be a lot more she would be interested in and I would have to move the shelves around.  May be I will win the lottery and will be able to afford new shelves or may be a newer house with a bigger school room! Dreams!

It is still not as perfect as I want it to be, but for now it works and it is way better than our old setup.  I don't have before pictures, but our previous set up was very cluttered.  In the ideal world I would have matching shelves for all the areas and would have moved the supplies out of the room into another area that is accessible easily, but I did not want to spend any money and so re-used what we already had.  The important thing is that D and M love this and have been having a blast in there!