Our New Set-Up and Methods

As I mentioned in my last post, we have been changing things up a bit to better fit RockerTot's preferences. This is all leading up to his birthday at the end of this month when he will begin a year-long transition from our Tot-School years to his official Pre-Kindergarten year.



Much of what we do will still be hands-on, but with a different purpose. He has started reading and is figuring out many basic addition and subtraction concepts on his own, so we will not be focusing on letters, numbers, colors, shapes, etc. He's let me know that he's a big boy who already knows that stuff. Where did my baby go??

Another change will be his blog name. I will simply refer to him as R from now on. He can't be a tot forever... or can he?

Well, as I promised, here are some photos of our little school corner.


This was our unused breakfast bar on the living room side of our kitchen peninsula. We had two bookshelves that fit perfectly underneath the counter (well, with just a bit of tweaking).

Here are the items that are currently calling these shelves home. Some of these will rotate with other items and some have found this to be a more permanent home.


Foam letter and number puzzles ($1 at Wal Mart). These will go soon. I just wanted to make sure that he wasn't interested in them anymore, so I put them out again.



Here are two sets of letter magnets for his magnet board. He loves to spell words.


Upper and lower case matching puzzles


His bottle-cap name sheet


Crepe beads and baubles


Geoboards and bands


Geometric solids and one of our card sets


Eraser pattern cards


Coin sorting


Finger and number cards with control sheet


Linking cubes (he continues the pattern that I place in there)


Pre-writing cards


Letter pieces, mat and mini-doodler


Various stencils and markers


Beads and cards for lacing


Drawers with our workbooks and tools that I need handy, but don't want to leave out. I mentioned in our Weekly Wrap-Up that I set out his workbooks on the counter above the shelves and he know to let me know if he feels like doing one (or more). He chooses them daily.


Might Mind and Super Mind puzzles


Several 24 to 50 piece jigsaw puzzles.

I'm still working out how I'd like to display our library books/read-aloud choices.