Montessori Without A Schoolroom

I have had moms-especially in person-say to me, "I'd love to use the Montessori Method in my home, but we don't have a school room."  "I like what you do at your house, but I couldn't do it at mine because we don't have the space."

I will say that it has been very nice to have a school room to set up our prepared environment.  BUT, that has all changed!!

Two weeks ago, our basement FLOODED!  It has had water in it before, but we added some window well covers, diverted some of the water, and purposely placed items where we knew they wouldn't get wet.  Well, so much for what we knew!

After hours of bailing water that was-literally-pouring into the basement, we discovered that the opposite end of the basement was slowly taking in water that was coming UP the drain!!  At that point, we realized that our efforts were futile.

I quickly started finding any bins I could from the store room (which meant I dumped all the clothing that had been in them) and started filling them up with our Montessori Materials.  We stacked all the bookshelves up on top of the tables to keep them from getting wet, and hoped for the best.

Thankfully, only the flooring was really ruined.  But, I no longer feel comfortable setting our school room back up down there.  And, our toy room took over our old school room, so I can't just put it back where it was.

So we are now 'Montessori' without a schoolroom.

And what does that look like???

Here are some views from the other day.

I have started placing works on our bookshelf, and hoping the kids will pick them up.  Charger really enjoyed our car three part cards.

Mini Cooper found our Marble Mind Game.

She also dressed herself :).

She asked to explore our timeline cards from Classical Conversations.  

And, Mustang has been really interested in online learning.  Here she is watching a YouTube video to help her learn her prepositions from Classical Conversations.  She did this for a straight hour!

Due to no classroom, we have had to do some more 'seat' type work at the table, but it is working out so far.  I'm just having to get used to creating a household environment that is always encouraging self directed learning.  I'm very interested in how this new journey will go!  I promise to keep updating as we adapt to our new learning situation.  

Thanks for stopping by and God Bless!

Organizing Children's Books: Our Home Library

Finally, I can tell you that our home library is organized!!  This summer, my amazing aunt and uncle hauled a huge Expedit shelf from IKEA to my house.  When I say hauled, I mean from Arizona to the Mid-west.  So yes, hauled!!  I am forever grateful :).  This week, I finally got my rear in gear and got it to look the way I wanted.  

Here is it!  After purging two large boxes of books I was able to fit pretty much every book (not curriculum) that we own on the shelf. We have very few adult books since we use digital.  But, I feel that children need real books when they are young.  

I hemmed and hawed about how to arrange them.  Initially I thought about sorting by theme, but too many overlapped and I was stressed about whether I should put the book about sea creature with oceans or animals.  Then, I thought about by author-but only one of my children can read so I would be the only one putting them back.  Not cool.

So, I chose by color!!  I saw this once a long time ago and thought it was silly.  Now, I think it's genius, LOL!  I did pull out chapter books and put them in bins and some of the chapter books are in the drawers at the bottom.  They just aren't as pretty!

Our shelf tour starts at the top.  

Our globe pillow-it might get swapped out for a real globe.  But, I wanted one the kids could play with.

Camera bag that belonged to my great grandma.  It needs to be repaired so I can't use it for a formal bag.  BUT, it can be used for storage and makes me happy when I see it.

Our continent box.  This was going to go in the school room, but I thought it would be great to have it out with the books for my children to explore when they are reading.  It is slowly being filled with continent packets.  I'll show you them when it's finished.

The view from below.

Little pom poms with magnets for magnet pages which will be in the drawers at the bottom.

On the left is a set of rug checkers.

Some of the checkers are on another shelf.  I like the way they look!

A super cool marble mind game for kids.

One of our favorite games, Flea Circus.  The bin holds our Happy Hollister books-LOVE!  Our poetry books are here, too.  One of the few things that didn't get put into the rainbow.  The last package on the right is a book and puppet set.

Books are held in front by plate holders. I chose our brand new book, There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly to make sure the kids saw it right away.

In our Classical Conversations timeline, Egyptians are mentioned.  I thought that my children would enjoy reading about something they had heard about.  It's a cute story!

In honor of the Presidential debates, I brought out Arthur Meets the President

and Duck for President. 

I will change the books out as I see they have been read or want to bring attention to others.  Mustang has already switched them out for ones she is reading or wants to read-specifically all four slots are each holding one of the Happy Hollister books.  I had wanted to put the books lower but Explorer kept pulling them off the shelf and the plate holders aren't that durable!

 The bins below hold a few games, chapter books, and some art supplies.  

I hope you enjoyed our little library tour!  

Thanks for stopping by and God Bless!

Our School Room

Since we were on vacation, I almost missed my favorite blog hop week of the year, but thankfully I didn't!!

It's the Not Back to School Hop at Heart of the Matter online-School Room Week. I love school rooms, I love looking at other's learning spaces, and this year I finally have a school room of my own to share! It has it's issues, but it's ours and I love it!

I took a ton of pictures, because you can never have too many school room photos to browse :). Things to imagine-soft robin's egg blue walls in place of landlord's crazy wallpaper, and no red curtain on the window. We usually leave the window curtain free, but it was about 100 degrees out when I took these photos and we wanted to minimize the sunshine.



This is from the doorway looking in. On the left we have our lesson table. I got this table for free from our church when they were upgrading. There are 3 folding chairs-one for me, one for Mustang, and one for Charger. On the table, I keep our white board and other things that we are using at that time.

In front of the big table is our Tot School table. I found this for 19.99 on clearance at Menards after Christmas. There is a little bin in the middle that holds our picture books for the week. Our bookshelves are downstairs.



In the corner is our chalkboard/white board easel (the white board is on the other side). I found this for 10.00 at a yard sale. The art supplies are in the two white bins to the left of the easel (1.00 yard sale). Underneath the easel is a bin of play dough and a basket of instruments. They just fit there, so that's where they went!

We also have 2 desks in the room. This gives the kids an option of doing their work alone, by me, or on the floor. The desk on the left is Charger's and was free from our local Catholic School that was upgrading its desks. The one on the right is Mustang's, a 5.00 yard sale find.



To the right of the desks are our shelves. This is where I put our trays and learning tools for our 'free learning time.' There are some themed items and some things that are out most of the time (the Pink Tower for example). I try to change these out every couple weeks.



These are 15.00 Walmart shelves, and I like the way they look together! I hope to have rain gutter bookshelves above them someday!!



In the middle there is our new calendar. I finally used my Amazon gift cards from Christmas and bought this very cool Learning Resources Calendar and Weather Chart. And um, wow, it was not that much when I ordered 2 months ago! I'm really liking that I have a pocket calendar. Before, I had one from the Dollar Tree-which was cost effective, it was just time to replace it!




If you swing back around and look behind our lesson table you will see my area. On these shelves I keep the lesson books that we are using, math manipulatives, alphabet boxes (until I can get one of those cool drawer boxes made up), markers/glue/scissors, Bible Activity binders, finished work, etc, etc! There's also usually a 20 bottle of Mountain Dew :).

What you see behind that is an old built in wardrobe that needs to be organized, so no photos :). I keep all kinds of art stuff in there.

You may be wondering where we keep all the rest of the 'stuff.' Especially the things I use on our trays. I am thankful to have a storage room right next to this and I keep all that stuff in there. I wrote a post on it about a month ago, Organizing the Homeschool Stuff.

So that's our space. What does yours look like? I'd love to see it and so would tons of other people!! Come link up at the Not Back to School Hop at the Heart of the Matter Online.

Happy Learning and God Bless!

Organizing the Homeschool STUFF

I have been on a bit of an organizing frenzy lately (thank you 2nd trimester nesting energy). The last couple days I have turned my focus to an area that has been frustrating me for a LOOOOOOONG time. My homeschool stuff.

Our homeschool style is a little different then some. We are very eclectic. We have a curriculum, but I most just use that as a guide to keep me on some sort of track. Then I use that to help me determine our unit lessons and the activities on our shelves. I pull a lot from the Montessori method of learning as well and try to make it all mesh together. This style of learning/teaching seems to require a lot of 'stuff.' Or maybe its just me and my slight addiction to buying learning tools, games, and manipulatives. I like to change things up often and to do that you need things to change to.

As I looked for inspiration for my organization project, it was hard to find! There are many posts about organizing your homeschool. These posts tend to be where to put the glue, crayons and pencils. It just wasnt what I was looking for. I did find one post, on 1+1+1=1, that helped a lot. It makes sense that the blogger that got me going on my homeschool journey would be the one who would understand the need to tell me how to organize all these wonderful school toys and resources.

Here's where I started:





I have designated 1/2 of my storage room for school stuff. My store room is right next to our school room, so the proximity is great for moving things back and forth. I moved all the stuff in here about 2 months ago when I got tired of looking at it in the school room. It wasnt a calm learning atmosphere in my opinion.

As you can see there was an attempt at organization-with banker boxes and such, but this set up wasnt working for me. I couldnt see what was in the boxes and there was no real rhyme or reason to why I put what where except it fit. Of course the last picture shows no organization at all and thats because it wasnt.

So, off to Walmart I went. Like I have mentioned before we just dont have cool organization stores. Thankfully, I found a few things I thought would work and brought them home.



I found these stackable laundry baskets that allowed me to take advantage of the large height of each shelf without using huge, bottomless pit, bins. They can hold little pieces in place while still allowing me to see what's in them and access them pretty easily.



It took me a bit to decide HOW to divide the things I had. I finally came up with the following categories, mostly following the Montessori areas: Math, Language, Practical Life, Sensorial, Geography, Science, Bible, Music, Fall, Christmas/winter, Spring & Summer, Tot School stuff (many of the other things are for Tot school, but some things are just for a Tot), Containers, Building toys, and puzzles.


If you look at the pictures you may realize that there arent THAT many bins. Some things got combined just due to the fact that I had less items in that area. Things too big for the bins were placed just to the side of that bin. I purposely chose to put bins that had overflow on top of bins that didnt so there wasnt any confusion as to which bin it went with.

I didnt create labels, because I'm the only one touching these items and I can see where everything is. I figured that labels in this case were not a priority. I may do them in the future, because I love the way they look :).



And speaking of looks, I did not like the way that this dresser looked in our school room. Its very functional for holding supplies and paper, etc, but it wasnt making a calm atmosphere in our school room. It was heavy and couldnt really go anywhere in the room other then where it was, and I just didnt like it there. I didnt want to loose this storage, though. Drawers provide a great storage medium!



So, I hauled it next door into the storage room. Thankfully, I could do that since the rooms are so close!



The top shelves are being used (mostly) for puzzles. There is also a box of our books on tape, finished work, and a few odds and ends that didnt have another home. The drawers are currently holding extra notebooks, glue, pens, paper, etc. You know the 'normal' stuff :).

I realize that it still has a bit of a cluttered look to it, but that is to be expected with these types of things. At least now, I can close the door on it!

How do you organize your school stuff? I would love to see your set up. Let me know if you have a post I can read about it, please!

Have a great weekend! God Bless!!

Our Homeschool Classroom Tour!

Over the last year or so, I have been pouring over websites and blogs that show how others have organized their homeschool classroom. I'd like to invite you on a tour of ours...

A couple weeks ago, I finally decided I HAD to have a separate room for school, so the kids are now sharing a bedroom and that is working well. Mustang's room is now the school room. I chose it because it has lots of sunlight, can be closed off when school is not in session, and already had a great map of the world left behind from our awesome Uncle!



This is the view from the door. In the middle, I have re purposed an old coffee table as our school table. I like how it is round, I do wish it were slightly taller. The bed is Mustang's old bed. I didnt take it out because I often get hairs and I wanted to be sure that I liked this school room arrangement before I tore down her bed. I also need an extra place for her to sleep if we do have guests. As it turns out, it has been a great addition to the room. The best part is that I have a comfortable place to nurse Mini Cooper and still be right there with Mustang and Charger.



To the left of the door is our first set of shelves. On the first set, the top two shelves are sensorial and practical life. The bottom two are Mini Coopers' 'Tot School' items. A small bin on the floor holds a few board books.

The cabinet to the right holds our books. The top shelf has our manipulatives and a few art supplies. The top of the cabinet has all the things I dont want little hands getting into. I use an old sash to tie the cabinet shut if I dont want the kids in there. The cabinet needs an L bracket on the back, but doesnt yet have one. So, I dont want the kids in the cabinet unless I am standing there.



Our large world map is above the white shelves. It's not completely accurate, but its so neat to look at. Plus, it is fixed to the wall and not moving anytime soon. So, its better if I love it.



Continuing around the room there are 2 more sets of shelves. On the left shelf I plan to put mostly Culture and Math, and on the right, Language. Right now there is a bit of a mixture until I have more of these type of works on the shelves. Art is on the top right shelf.



On the other wall we have a hideous old console TV that was lovingly left behind by family. It works, but we are not currently in need of another TV. It ended up here and as it weighs a TON, it's not moving. So we are using the top as a table. This is our flag and calendar {in case you didnt already figure that out lol}. The little blue bins hold Mustang and Charger's sound books, number books, and completed work. The baskets hold the things I am working on and the things I need for our group table time.

We hope you have enjoyed looking around our school room & seeing how we chose to organize it! If you would like to see more great learning spaces, check out the Tot Zone post at 1+1+1=1. {I will be adding more links as I find good ones}. God bless!