Creating a Fun Learning Environment

We live a two bedroom, one bath home. We have no formal dining room and no basement. We have no extra room to designate as the "schoolroom" or "playroom". Keeping this in mind, I'd like to share some of the changes I've recently made in our home to make it both entertaining and educational for RockerTot. I'd also welcome any suggestions you have for making it better.

This is our special "school tray" area. It's in our kitchen. I try to rotate the items out two or three times per week. Most of these items are Montessori inspired (the "real things" are way too expensive, lol), but some are just for fun. I allow him to play with these trays whenever he wants to. I never force or schedule time for it. He will just naturally gravitate to the shelves each day and pick something.

Our first trays for this week are:
- hammering & pulling "nails" (golf tees) out of very dense upholstery foam using a quality toy hammer (it has a bit of weight to it)
- adding to his sticker book
- Canimals (Dollar Tree version of "Barrel of Monkeys".. he can sort them by color or link them in chains or do whatever he wants with them)



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Here is our "Letter Board" (in a former life, it was a cookie sheet). It is on the small wall behind our front door (meaning, you can't see it if the door is open.. please ignore the dingy walls, we have scrubbed and scrubbed). I rotate between different sets of magnetic letters & numbers on a weekly basis. This week we're using LeapFrog Fridge Phonics. We also use a set of lowercase letters, different number magnets and our Magnet School letters and cards (we did NOT pay the price listed in the link.. it was $25 at Target). The basket below is used to hold the Magnet School cards or any letters/numbers he is not using at the moment.



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Tucked along the wall next to our unused breakfast bar (we don't have barstools) is RockerTot's kitchen and cleaning area. The green thing in the shopping basket is his apron. I'm not really sure of what to say about this area.. I guess it's self-explanatory.



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Now, we move into RockerTot's bedroom. I call this his "Engineering Shelf" because it is mostly made up of blocks and puzzles.

Starting from the top:
- Small wooden stacking rings (these are NOT self-correcting like their plastic counterpart.. the dowel is not tapered)
- Melissa & Doug Stacking Train
- Wooden Alphabet Blocks
- A few items from his Tinkertoy set
- Nesting/Stacking Cubes
- Wooden trains and track parts to experiment with track designs
- >Puzzles (I'll rotate these out every few days or so)
- Mega Blocks
- Activity cube with bead maze
- Stack and Roll Cups



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Okay, I have these four shelves available in the living room. I just haven't figured out what to do with them yet. I'd love to leave some crayons, paper and other basic art supplies out, but RockerDad might freak out if I did that with a two year old. I've also pondered a dress up/make believe area. I just don't know. Any suggestions?



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This is his normal toy shelf in his bedroom. These items stay out all the time. I taped pictures of the items that go inside the blue bins so that RockerTot would know how to tidy his room. I'm working on a better solution for his books. Hopefully I'll decide soon.

We had to scale down toys and everything else before we moved into such a small place. RockerTot's big brother's toys are on the shelves above the ones shown (out of RockerTot's reach).

Regular "anytime" toys are:
- Trucks (only one is pictured, but he has several that are normally in a basket)
- Trains are kept in a blue bin
- Little People airplane
- Hot Wheels go in the reissue storage wheel
- board books (I'm going to start slowly phasing in the regular books.. he's been fine with them for a while, I've just been lazy. They're all in my room.)
- Dinosaurs (another blue bin)
- Balls (his baseball glove and a few action figures have somehow ended up in this bin as well)