The Learning Room

The other day I went to my friend's house for a play-date and was impressed to see that an entire section of her family room was dedicated to learning time for her two preschool aged kids. She had a little easel and a calendar, a weather wheel and all kinds of workbooks. I asked her what she did with it and she said that every morning for about an hour and a half she did "summer school" with her kids. The 2 year old worked on colors and shapes and basic letter stuff, the 5 year old worked on writing and math. They also did circle time, crafts, games, and snack.

I was inspired! I racked her brain for all her ideas then the next day I hit the teacher supply store and loaded up on posters, stickers, flashcards, workbooks, games, and our own little whiteboard/blackboard easel. It was so much fun! When I got home I started converting the useless living room (which literally almost never got used) into our new Learning Room. I totally got back into my old teacher mode and felt like I was setting up my classroom at the beginning of the school year.

Here's how it came out. The wall behind the the girls is where we do calendar, weather, and songs with shapes and colors. The girls use that little pointer in Brinley's hand to find the things I'm talking about on the posters.

This side of the room is where all the supplies are and where the girls get to display their finished projects. They also each have their own special folder for all their worksheets.

Here are some of the fun books I found for lesson ideas. They had them at Wal-mart and Sams. So far my favorite ones are the Mead books from Wal-mart.

Teya is working on her pre-writing skills. She was getting really frustrated trying to write her name. I talked to one of my friends who was a kindergarten teacher and said we should try to start more basic and work on shapes and lines first. She's doing great and is writing her name in all uppercase letters, now we just need to work on lowercase.

We've been doing learning time for a week now and so far they are loving it!

We usually do it for an hour and half, but the girls always end up back in the learning room through out the day to color, paint, do crafts or play-doh.

Here are some fun pics from yesterday when we did the color red.

They made red paintings.

And red ladybug headbands.

I cut out all the pieces and they glued them together. Teya glued her entire ladybug, spots, eyes, antennae and everything all by herself. It was great to see her so focused on something.

I'm hoping to do some cute themes with this board as we get further into it, but for now they love seeing their projects displayed on the wall.

It's been a lot of fun working on this little project and helped me get excited again about doing an important part of my job as a mom: teaching : )