Welcome to my fourth annual school room tour! While the room hasn’t changed much, the materials sure have. DJ completed the Montessori 3-6 primary series and is beginning Montessori Lower Elementary. So all of the iconic Montessori materials are gone – no more Pink Tower, Brown Stair, Number Rods. No more sandpaper letters, movable alphabet or metal insets. So what has taken their place? Books! Books, books and more books. And paper and pencils.

This is DJ’s main workspace. He works, plays and eats at his table and also uses the floor a lot. I do most of my work sitting on the sofa next to his table. Today you can see the Lego Minecraft Fortress that he and I put together last night.

Another change this year is that I switched the math and language shelves and separated geometry from math. I needed two shelf sections for math and only one for language.

Also on this end of the room are the art supplies and the puzzle maps cabinet. The Montessori Continents Globe has been replaced with a traditional globe.

The math shelves have the Metal Fraction Circles on top. The Fraction Squares and Triangles are sharing space in the Geometric Cabinet. Also on top is the Large Bead Frame for math operations and our Digital Art Frame. I updated the art on it for the first time in a long time. I found this great list of the Worlds 50 Best Works of Art (according to the author) and I like it because it is in chronological order through history and at least tries to hit all the continents. (Sorry Australia). And yes, the art frame is not math but it still fits best here.

On the left section from top to bottom is the Golden Bead Material, Wooden Number Cards, Addition & Subtraction Finger Charts, Stamp Game, Snake Game, Decanomial Bead Box, Strip Board and Dot Game. On the right section, top to bottom are math workbooks, clock work, operations box, multiplication & division charts & boards, prepared equation tickets and beads for the operation boards, wooden number tiles for the finger charts, hundred board, plastic fractions box and small number cards.

The space between the shelves and map cabinet has large art paper, large chalkboards and library books. I need a better place for the library books but I have found that keeping them there helps to keep them separate from the rest of our books and this easier to find when it comes time to return them.

The other end of the room has the geometry and language shelves to the left. The tall shelves in the back are mostly science and culture. The piano is where DJ practices his piano lessons each day. The two towers of drawers on the right are DJ’s Lego collection. Each drawer is sorted by type and unsorted pieces go in the bin on top. Whenever the bin gets full, I help him sort them into their drawers. The cabinet behind the Lego drawers has dad’s videos and games. (Yes, we need more space!)

The top of this shelf has a small bookcase. The books to the left are the Treehouse Series and Dragon Slayer Series that I am reading to DJ. The books on the right are books DJ can read himself. To the right of that are DJ’s work journal and subject journals. He’ll use these to record all of his work this year. Next to that is a desk organizer with pencils, colored pencils, paper clips, scissors and glue. That will likely be on his table most often, but we moved it for our Lego project. Behind that are the grammar symbols, some markers and a couple staplers.

The left section is for geometry. From top to bottom, the binomial & trinomial cubes, Geometric solids, 5 boxes of Constructive Triangles, a box of 12 Blue Triangles and the Geometric Cabinet. I haven’t purchased the Geometric Sticks box yet nor the Elementary Geometric Solids but when I do, they’ll go here.

The right section, from top to bottom has Bookshark History books, colored pencils, chalk, small chalkboard, printed alphabet, phonogram folders, grammar symbols, and writing workbooks. The red basket #1 has all of the material for the 8 grammar boxes. The blue basket #2 has some 3-part cards and random booklets. The green basket #3 is currently empty!

The tall shelf in the back are a mix of science and culture. I moved the continent boxes here to make space for the bookshelf. There is a box for each continent plus one for the oceans. Then from the top we have zoology puzzles, random supplies, new encyclopedias!, a children’s dictionary, more random items, a balance and cards for the botany cabinet. The much-unloved botany cabinet is on the bottom with some microscope slides tucked to the right. The microscope currently lives on top of the piano.

Last year our school room grew into the dining room with the Bells Cabinet and Complete Bead material. This section hasn’t changed. These are even the same pictures from last year because I didn’t want to bother to get the lighting right for the exact same picture!

With DJ reading now, the schoolroom has grown again into his bedroom upstairs. He’s had the small cloth bookshelf since he was a baby but it just doesn’t hold enough. So we added this neat ECR bookshelf. Many of the books can be forward facing but even still we have too many so each slot has at least two books in them. Then the bottom section hold a lot more books. (And yes, we do need to re-hang his mirror. We recently rebuilt his closet and just never got the mirror back up. There’s always something, isn’t there?)

And there you have it! Education ready to happen. It seems school starts later here than elsewhere in the country so our official “first day” won’t be until Sept 11. I put that in quotes though because we’re already doing reading, writing and history each day and a weekly ceramics class.

Here’s to a great 2017-18 school year!