Schooling at home

In the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of reading and organizing for our homeschool/learning space and it's finally starting to come together. I've reorganized a corner of our family room as the learning space. We've got the art table, the sensorial activities shelf, the blue rug is for activity time. We've got numbers and letters. As well as a nice vase of flowers of a little bit of nature inspiration.

After three months of attempting to thrift a low shelf, I finally gave up and went with some shoe racks stacked on top of one another. The black shelf are the shoe racks. It serves my purpose perfectly, it was cheap and easy to assemble.

Above that shelf you can see the numbers 0-9. I found the idea in Growing up Sew Liberated. They are scraps of different colored fabric hand appliquéd on to rectangles of wool felt. The idea is to trace the number with your fingers to gain the muscle memory for writing eventually. So far Sofia knows 123 really well.

Next we've been doing a lot of memory work. Sofia really enjoys matching games so I've printed out and laminated a few different sets of matching cards. Above you see different birds. We also have frogs and various animals.

I also printed up a size matching set. This one is more of a challenge and she really likes it. You can find all of these print outs at the Montessori Print Shop.

This morning I just put up this weather chart. It has removable weather symbols so that we can change it daily. Though at this rate looks like nothing will change until monsoons arrive! Sunny, hot, no clouds.

For the toddler set, practical life skills are the funnest activities to teach. I recently bought Sofia a mop and manual vacum to add to the way we can clean up. Funny side note the other day Sofia was helping me bake, she dropped an egg while I was looking for something in the pantry. She got off the learning tower, got the mop, mopped up the egg and then came to me and said, "It's all clean so you won't be mad." And sure enough that was cute enough to make me full of joy. Needless to say I was the opposite of mad, even though it wasn't really that clean and now I had egg to wash off the mop as well.

I got this idea for a control square off of Pinterest. I put it down this morning with painters tape. The idea is that the child sweeps into the square so they learn the muscle memory for the direction you need inorder to make a pile for picking up the crumbs. I thought it was totally brilliant as I was having trouble with Sofia sweeping everything all over the floor after I swept it into a pile.

Lastly, Sofia has elected to do her own laundry!She takes the items out of her hamper and throws them in the washer for me. Too cool!

Don't forget to check back tomorrow for Toddler Art Thursday! I'll be talking about natural art supplies and doing a giveaway from Stubby Pencil Studio.