Montessori Rotation Zone

I’m very excited about bringing more Montessori into the home. I already have a fairly good area set up in the learning room for setting out activities as I present them. I am concerned by the potential for overwhelming the kids with all of the new activities. I also know that it takes the Peanut exactly a nanosecond to utterly destroy every sorted, organized, pieced together material that I set out. I knew after a few presentations last year that I wanted a rotation zone for materials that were going to be saved for future presentations. I only want to bring out a few things at a time. I spent the last couple of days last week cleaning out the closet under our stairs to serve as the rotation zone. It has a couple of advantages – it’s big (well it is after I removed about 3 season’s worth of coats and jackets out of it, 2 vacuum cleaners, baby toys, and 3 folding tables) and it is central – located a few steps from our learning room.

First, I emptied. This looks impressive, but if I had panned to my right and left you could have seen all of the embarrassing stuff lining the hall and my bedroom that came out of that closet.

Then, Sweet Pea built more of those great shoe shelves for me.

Finally, I went through the shelves in the learning room and pulled all of the Montessori stuff I have already. Most of the stuff on these shelves is “Montessori wanna-be” like the sorting bears from Walmart, but the point is that it is all stuff that I would need in the resource closet, or would want to rotate on or off of the Montessori shelves in the learning room.

Then, a simple latch was added to the closet! Perfect!