Dear Sis,

William is a few lessons away from completing the preschool program we started last March. In the last month, I’ve been purchasing our PreK curriculum and expanding our storage to accommodate it. It turned out really nice!

Last year, all of our homeschooling materials fit on this one shelf we found at a yard sale. This year, William’s fish, Sky, and her light for gloomy days occupies the top of the shelf, Social Studies and Science occupy shelf one, Thinking Skills occupies self two, and spills over to shelf three, which also houses our Art (art study, music, cooking, and sewing) curriculum.

This shelf is a super inexpensive option by Mainstay that can be found at Walmart. I bought a little more space than we needed this year, to allow growing room in the years to come.

Our houseplant, which used to hand in front of this window, now occupies the top of the shelf. The first shelf, contains what we have so far of our literature based Language Arts curriculum, which will grow as the year passes and we acquire more of the reading selections. The second shelf houses our Mathematics curriculum.

The third shelf contains our Emotional Intelligence materials and a small drawer set that holds our scissors, glue sticks, and writing tools. Half of the third shelf and the fourth shelf and left open by design, Once we begin our Montessori math and inquiry, we will need that space to house rotational hand-on math activities.  

The final shelf has two bins, one for letter manipulatives and one for math manipulatives. The wooden tray on the side is our Montessori Sand Tray used for practicing letter formation.

This finial shelf is an inexpensive magazine rack I found on Amazon. The top row houses our current selection of living literature for our first unit, dinosaurs. The second row houses William’s Highlights magazines from the subscription Granny got him for his fourth birthday. The third row contains educational books for Charlotte, she is only 18 months old, but she is pretty sure she needs school materials too! The bottom row is her rotational shelf, it has two dinosaur themed board books in it right now, one of which she is reading.

The wall art, was a free printable I found here: I Think We Could be Friends. The frames are some Dollar Tree frames I have on hand for when I decide to mail grandparents pictures of the kids. 

The manuscript alphabet poster is another Amazon find.  I backed it with some foam board I had leftover from another project to add rigidity. We will use it in a few letter games over this coming school year.

Every time I add more things to our living space I’m worried that it will make it look cluttered, but these additions fit very nicely! 

Love,

b