It’s official. We’re card carrying homeschoolers! Today marks the beginning of our third week of homeschooling and so far it’s gone pretty well. We haven’t been without our ups and downs, as well as Joey adjusting to the transition moving from a public school Montessori classroom to Montessori at home. But we’re enjoying the freedom and flexibility it’s bringing to our family. No early morning dash to get everyone dressed, fed, and out of the house by 7:30!
It’s been fun setting up our classroom. I had a few moments of “I don’t remember the sequence!” and “Am I even doing this right?” with materials I’ve set-up and taught at home and in the classroom many times before! I do love printing and laminating all the things.
This year Joey is in 1st grade, Otto is in K4, and Olivia in preschool.
Our Montessori Homeschool Room
We don’t have the largest or most ideal Montessori space, but we make what we have work for us. I’ve learned you can’t always be drooling over the perfect Montessori set-up you see. Work with what you have, where you are.
Montessori is more about freedom, discovery, and learning than it is about having all the right materials and a perfect space.
Here we have our basic art supplies, paper, art supplies, metal insets, pin poking, and sensorial. We don’t have the space to set up our pink tower and brown stair “properly,” so they are stacked in the box.
Our mainstays: language, practical life, and math. On the middle shelf each child has a file folder with their notebooks for any writing, nature journal, and coloring books for Olivia. Joey has a notebook for each subject. He uses these to write his language words, math equations, and pastes any drawings or coloring sheets (like maps or plant/animal sorting) he may have. It keeps it all in one space rather than having a bunch of loose papers to keep track of.
Above the children’s shelf is a storage box for our language materials. Ideally, I’d have enough space for each part of the Montessori reading series on the shelf, but I don’t. So all the materials are stored in felt pouches in their respective drawer.
I always seem to be finding a new printable that will work great for something down the road or a work in progress. Instead of having to keep track of a stack of randomness, I designated a folder for each area. It also works great as a place to put activities we’ll be doing in the coming weeks, but don’t have the shelf space for. I also store my language, math, science, and sensorial albums here.
I use to have one of those bright, loud calendars you see in preschool classrooms, but it wasn’t really my style. I bought this whiteboard calendar from Target and made my own numbers and labels for the months and days of the week.
We’re finding our daily routine and adjusting as we go.
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3 comments… add one
Beautiful post. Congratulations on Homeschooling! Our homeschooling days are my most cherished memories! I really like your simple & elegant whiteboard calendar!
Hi. Great post. I was just wondering if you could list or post photos of exactly what type of language/math/practical items you have on your shelves? Im just starting to homeschool and im a bit overwhelmed with all the different things available to help homeschooling.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed! Because my kids range from 9 months to 7.5 years old (at the time of the post they were 2.5 to 6.5), which covers infant/toddler to lower elementary so we just don’t have the space to lay out everything in each sequence. That’d be crazy! What I do is just put on the shelf 3-4 activities that they either have just learned and the few activities that follow. Those activities really depend on the ability of each child.
As we get ready to go back to school, I’ll try to post more specifics of what we have on our shelves.