Friday, September 7, 2007

Our Learning Room

This is our learning room in the basement. This space in the basement used to be our family room and now half of it is devoted to school.Starting at the left hand side is our bookshelf of picture books. Next to that is the metal insets and sandpaper letters. Around the corner is another shelf for language material, followed by a practical life shelf, and then the math shelf. And there is Matthew folding a tea towel :)
A closer look at the three shelves: a half-empty language shelf (more language materials to be made :) with the movable alphabets and a chalk board for writing. The practical life section contains materials for washing leaves of a plant, dry and wet pouring, spooning, medicine dropper, nuts and bolts and clothpins. The math section contains the golden bead materials, sandpaper numerals, spindle boxes, numeral and counters, large and small number cards, ten and teen boards, and the color bead stairs.Going around the corner, are two low shelves for the geography/sensorial materials. And as you can see behind the shelves and the sofa, there are toys in the other side of the room (our "downsized" family room). So far, it has been a blessing that the children have not set foot in this "play area" during "work period." For geography, there are the globes of land/water and continents. We have two maps for now - World and Canada. The free standing sensorial material are the red rods and the pink tower. On top of the shelves are the geometry cabinet, geometric solids and metal fractions. The sensorial shelf contains the knobbed and knobless cylinder, sound boxes, color tablets, brown stairs, binomial and trinomial cubes, and constructive triangles. Turning around 90 degrees (on the opposite wall to the previous language/practical life/math shelves) is our shelves for "things that didn't fit in the other shelves." There are some toys e.g. leappads and doodle pros on the two left columns of that big 5x5 bookcase. Then the rest of lower shelves are plant and animal puzzles and dressing frames. The tall bookcase on the right is waiting for more materials, probably math related such as addtion and subtraction strip boards.
Finally, our library. It used to be books for the parents, but children's books have invaded almost half the shelves (and we are happy with that :) The lower corner shelf holds the tabernacle from Our Father's House. The lower shelves of the CD tower hold the items from their miniature mass kit. I'm hoping to add more CGS materials and store them in those empty shelves behind the glass doors.It took a long time to get this planned and organized, and I'm sure there will be more tweaking and moving things around along the way. I'm so grateful to everyone at the 4real forum! I don't think I would have achieved this without their sound advices, generous support and prayers. Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

How lovely!!!
I'm hiring you for my next remodeling job. :)

Andrea Gray said...

Wow! It looks amazing! Great job!

Anonymous said...

Lorraine, this is just a visual treat! What a wonderful space you have created for your children!

Cheryl said...

It looks wonderful. It's so well organized.

Sweetness and Light said...

I love it Lorraine!! Can you come do my house now??? I'm so glad you shared this, it's VERY inspriring!!

montessori_lori said...

It's absolutely fantastic! I love the shelves - everything looks understated and natural, which draws attention to the beautiful materials. Great job!

Lorraine said...

Thank you so much everyone for your kind words. I'm so flattered and humbled to hear from all of you, many of whom I consider "role models" in homeschooling.
BTW, half of the shelves were "gifts from God" since we either got them through garage sales or the Ikea "As-Is" corner.
Thanks again for visiting!