"School Room" tour 2014

While it is common for homeschool blogs to give "school room" tours, our school room is in our living room.  So welcome to our house!  Our living room is long and narrow so it's difficult to get an overview picture of the whole room.  The picture above is DJ's play area.  These shelves have mostly toys, although there are some educational benefits to most of them.  The brown box is full of books.  Too many books, I know, but I find it really hard to choose which ones to leave, so I just put them all in.  Well, not all, he has a bookshelf in his bedroom too.  Tucked between the books and the shelf, you can see DJ's rolled up work mat.  It's a 2'x4' piece of carpet that he rolls out to define his work space when doing Montessori activities.  On the wall, you can see his art easel that daddy made for him.  I'll have to do a detailed post on that soon.  The roadmap quilt on the floor was made by DJ's grandmother for his birthday.  It's not always there, but it was today.  The child's table is a great work area for DJ and he also eats many of his meals there.

It's been awhile!

I started this blog back in August with the intention of using it to plan the setup of our Montessori Preschool at home. And then life happened! Now it is May and DJ is 2.5 years old and what a difference. His language skills are amazing and it makes it so fun to be able to communicate with him.

Toddler Activities

Although D won't be in "official" preschool for more than a year, he is definitely in the school of LIFE right now.  He spends quite a bit of time doing practical life and sensorial activities.  Here are just a few:

Baking cookies - although his bowl is just pretend, it has all the real ingredients (except egg) for him to stir.  Didn't taste too bad either.  I was mixing the real batch while he practiced.

Vacuuming - D is obsessed with the vacuum these days and if we won't turn it on for him, he'll make the "vrmmmmmm" sound himself.  In this picture, it's actually turned on.

First Post!

Now that D is just weeks away from his second birthday, I'm beginning to feel the pressure of being prepared for homeschooling during his preschool years.  While it still seems amazing to me that preschool has become nearly mandatory in today's world, I can truly see D's potential as he learns so much every day on his own.  So I've been doing a lot of research on homeschooling methods for preschoolers and the early months of this blog will mostly be used to organize my thoughts, plans and supplies.