Welcome to my fifth Annual School Room Tour! The first three were for our preschool room, so this is the second elementary school room. But this is the first in our new house. When we moved here in January, I unpacked everything into shelves and stacked & stored them however they would fit. I just didn’t have time to really decide where best to place things. So I’ve spent the last couple of weeks starting over. I pulled everything off the shelves, piled it in the living room and slowly went through each item. On the second day of sorting, I discovered, I needed MORE shelves! So I headed off to Ikea to purchase 10 more shelves and ended up using 9 on them. It makes such a huge difference to use vertical space to its full potential.

So here is the main room. Unlike our previous house, we actually have a school room – but it’s not a place we want to do work in. Instead, we bring our work here to the living room. I mostly sit on the sofa and Danny mostly sits on the floor. He has a desk, but it’s really just a place to store his pencils, pencil sharpener and history books. He also has a set of Children’s Encyclopedias, a Children’s Dictionary and a Children’s Thesaurus on the bookshelf of his desk. The Large Bead frame is there because he uses it almost daily during school and the fraction skittles are there because he likes them!

We’ll also use the television more this year for school work. We’ve already started watching a show that aligns with his history work, and this year Danny will begin a new curriculum, Excellence in Writing, that includes teacher instruction on DVDs. And since the DVD player also has a YouTube app, we’ll use that to help answer the many questions that Danny asks that I can’t answer. The living room also has a nice, cozy fire place, a cat tree for our new kittens, a small bathroom, the piano and easy access to the kitchen and outside patio. It’s an ideal place to do school lessons.

The actual “school room” is just off the living room, and although it has a desk for me, I rarely sit in there. It’s main purpose is storing our school materials in an organized manner that works for both Danny and I. In preschool I had only used short black shelves, but when we moved into this space, I purchased four tall Besta shelves from Ikea, this time in white. Over the months that we’ve used them, I’ve learned that Danny cannot efficiently use the top two shelves. So when I reorganized the classroom, I used those levels only for my books and some works he’s already completed. From left to right, the four tall shelves are Science, Cultural, Math & Language. The short black shelf on the opposite wall has Geometry & Fractions.

As we’ve moved elementary, I’ve really struggled with storing science materials. So much of it seemed small, random and fragile. Then it occurred to me, I had this set of drawers empty since I packed up our miniature language objects. It was sitting dusty in the garage. Now, all but the lower two rows of drawers are full. Full of fossils, arrowheads, rocks, crystals, magnets, life cycle toobs, animal specimen, microscope slides, etc. I’m much happier with the science shelves now! If you look at the left of the top shelf in the picture above, you can see a small ceramic volcano. It’s red, like lava, with a green snake around it. (Don’t ask me why). Danny made that in his ceramics class.

I called this Cultural but it could also be Geography. The top shelf has the planets of the solar system I made for the First Great Lesson last year – although Earth is sadly missing! I have a hope that it’s in the playroom somewhere but I have not organized in there for too long and it takes courage to consider it!

The middle shelf is mostly Waseca Biome cards and some other random 3-part card sets. I have to say, storing & displaying card sets is a pain in the … !! I finally discovered that I had a bunch of small ivory envelopes that the Waseca cards fit in perfectly, so I sorted, filed and labeled envelopes for each set of cards included in the Introduction to Biomes – Elementary and North American Biomes sets.

The bottom four shelves are continent boxes full of cultural items from each continent. These are a preschool material and I made them years ago. But I put a lot of effort into making them and Danny still occasionally pulls them out to explore so I keep them. It does annoy me greatly that I can’t fit three across on a shelf so I feel like the waste a lot of space. But for now, we have the space so they stay.

Now this is a shelf that has so much going on! Montessori Math is my favorite part about Montessori and it’s because of these materials. Starting at the bottom going up:

Shelf 1: Golden Bead material with a quilted Golden Bead mat. Although mostly a preschool material, it does get some use in elementary and it’s one of Danny’s most favorite materials.

Shelf 2: Decanomial Box of beads. This huge box has 55 each of bead bars 1 to 10. So for you, non-Montessorians, that means 55 bars with 10 beads in gold, 55 bars with 9 beads in blue, 55 bars with 8 beads in brown, etc all the way down to 55 single beads. This box will get a lot of use this year!

Shelf 3: Stamp Game on the left and Snake Game on the right. Danny has mostly worked through the lessons on these but we’ll review & revisit as needed this year.

Shelf 4: Pegboard pegs on the left, Decimal board cubes in the middle and large number cards on the right. The pegboard is too large for the shelf and is leaning against the shelves next to the printer. The Decimal board is a couple shelves up. We’ll mostly use the pegboard this year, I think it might be awhile before we get to the decimal board.

Shelf 5: a stack of- Hundred Board, Multiplication Bead Board & Division Bead Board with the tiles & beads needed for them in the middle. To the right are three boxes of small number cards.

Shelf 6: a stack of- Dot Game Board, Addition/Subtraction Strips Boards, Decimal Board, Math Task Card & Math Fact booklets. The strips for the Strip Boards are on the right. I tried to remove the Strip Boards from the shelf but Danny refused. I hadn’t remembered him using it that much, let alone liking it.

Shelf 7: Clock/Time materials on the left, more task cards in the middle and Math Operation Tiles in the plastic storage bins.

Shelf 8: A bag of coins for Money work on the left, Speed card game in the middle, decanomial square pieces on the right. And behind all that a NEW quilted Multiplication Checkerboard that Danny’s grandmother made for him. We’ll definitely get some use of that this year.

These are the Language shelves and now you can see the over-sized pegboard leaning to the right. Again, starting at the bottom and working up:

Shelf 1: Printed Movable Alphabet, box of pencils & box of chalk. We don’t use the Movable Alphabet much anymore but I’m keeping it for those “just in case” moments.

Shelf 2: two green chalkboards.

Shelf 3: Coin envelopes with Words Their Way word sort cards on the left. A box of grammar symbols & a ziplock bag of Sentence Analysis labels in the middle. Grammar Box envelopes in the red bin on the right.

Shelf 4: Paper. Mostly paper. I am SO happy to have a decent way to store various type of paper this year! The section on the right also has the Excellence in Writing workbook, handwriting workbook, Waseca North America Portfolio workbook and various work journals. On the left and the right of the paper storage unit, there are oversized pads of drawing paper tucked in the sides.

Shelf 5: the thousand chain may that wouldn’t fit on the math shelves, with an orange bag of Story Cubes on the left, Grammar Symbols tray in the middle and a kit of art supplies on the right.

Across the room is a small shelf for geometry and fraction materials. The Hierarchical Material is set to the left of this shelf with the cork board for the geometry stick material slid between it and the shelf unit. The left of the shelf unit has the metal fraction circles on top. The bottom shelf has the Geometry Cabinet which also has the Metal Equivalency materials in it (I took out the extra circles & demonstration tray pieces to make room). The second shelf has the large box of Geometry Stick materials that I’m excited to use this year. The third, top shelf, has a box of plastic fraction pieces on the left and Attribute Blocks & Task Cards on the right.

Finally, the right side of this Geometry/Fractions shelf has the constructive triangle boxes on the top two shelves, the Binomial Cube, Trinomial Cube & Power of Two Cube boxes on the next shelf and Geometric Solids and some Geometry Task Cards on the bottom shelf. And of course the obligatory class globe found a space on top.

In this photo you can also see the four History Question Charts have been hung. You can get a bit better look at these in the video below. I did not make these. A homeschooling mom that sold me some of her materials gave these to me as a freebie. I’m not entirely certain we’ll use them in any structured way since I use non-Montessori curricula for History & Writing. But I figured even if I don’t use them, Danny might read them and get ideas from them.

Finally the last wall that has the door into the room also has our Math Bead Cabinet and World & Continent Map Puzzles. The puzzles are really a preschool material but Danny didn’t really get full use of them and they were expensive. So I keep them with the hopes that he’ll develop an obsession for geography and want to use them. Ideally, I would like to replace them with the PinIt! Maps bundle, but I can’t really afford it right now. Maybe by Christmas time. 🤩. I do believe Montessori teachers always have some dream material they’d love to acquire at all times! As soon as we get it, a new material takes its place.

So that’s the tour! For those of you who would like the video experience I did three walkthroughs, but there’s no sound so just watch!