Our School Room

Our school room (what should truly be the formal living room) often changes as I tweak the shelves so they flow better.  Because of space, I can't always keep everything out or in the logical Montessori order.  This is how it looks right now.

Here is the reading corner.  We had this bookshelf made in Costa Rica.

The language shelves.

To the left of the shelves - fabrics in the basket for make-believe, the alphabet drawers.

Left to Right: top: the moveable alphabet, rhyming games, reading series, matching word to object.

bottom: a basket of felt items that retell a story (like The Very Hungry Caterpillar),a sequencing activity, a blackboard and the sandpaper letters to practice writing, and story-telling wooden figures.

On the right of the shelves are the mats and rugs.

On top of the shelves, I often put the practical life trays.

Next are the geography shelves.  Maps and continent boxes go there.  

On the next set of shelves are the culture (mostly science right now) and sensorial materials.

The sensorial materials transition to the math materials, starting with the geometric cabinet.  There are the geometric solids as well that Montessorians consider sensorial.  From top to bottom, left to right are the number rods and sandpaper numbers, homemade spindle box, bead stair, decimal system (bead units, bars, squares and cubes and small numbers), geometric solids (on bottom) with the pattern blocks behind, a number puzzle, stereognostic bag and homemade baric tablets (really should be on other shelves), and the hundred board.

You can see our short bead chains hanging on the wall next to a small table.  The tray below the chains is for playing the banking game with the golden bead material.  And the empty oatmeal canister was being used for a garbage can and we forgot to move it!

I'm linking up to The Preschool Corner.

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