Little Girls' Room Do-Over

Not long ago, I posted about the girls bedroom makeovers.  All in all, their rooms have stayed about the same.  But the little girls' room seemed to become the bane of my existence every week.  It was constantly a mess, no one ever wanted to clean it up and things were getting broken and torn form being stepped on.  It was driving me insane!  A few weeks ago, I decided to take half of the "stuff" that they had and store it in the garage (to rotate out next summer).   Things were STILL constantly a mess.   So yesterday, I decided that today would be spent cleaning house and the little girls' room was my first stop.  As I was cleaning (mainly alone, because Bijou decided to spend this time laying on her back staring at the ceiling), I realized that it was pretty difficult to get toys in and out of the bins on the shelf. 

The only logical solution, of course, was to build a new shelf.  So, that's what I did!  I am going to insert a complaint here.  I love Home Depot, don't get me wrong.  But I was SO annoyed with HD today.  I went in to get wood for the shelf, found the pieces that I needed place neatly above a $5.98 price tag.  The very helpful HD employee even did some comparison pricing for me with a piece twice the size to see if we could cut a cents off the price by just cutting them in half.  We found that it would be about the same price, so I got my four boards.  The very helpful HD employee cut my boards and loaded them into my cart.  I get to the cash register with my plan to spend about $27 on wood and about $4 on nails.  The checkout girls scans the pieces and they are $8.40 a piece!  I mean, it's not a HUGE difference, but it added like $12 - $14 to my total cost!  I was so annoyed...ugh.  Anyway, complaint over...  The shelves were quick and easy to put together and the bins are much more accessible for small people who don't want to work to hard get their toys put away.

More homemade Montessori

So, on occasion the little girls come spend the day with me at work.  They love visiting the school and getting to use the materials.  I try to watch and see what things they enjoy and figure out if I can recreate them at home for little or no money.  Last weekend I made a decanomial.  It's made from craft foam (cheap, $5, and easy to cut).  Ashni (who HATES math) said, as soon as a demonstrated it for her, "Oh, it like multiplication."  I think the universe must have opened up and rained down joy on me!!!  It's like this method is what she has needed (particularly for math) for the last couple of years. 

Tonight I made some insets for Zion and Bijou.  They both love the metal insets at the school, so I decided to make a set from mat board to have here at home.  I traced the set at work to use as templates and the knobs are just wooden beads that are hot glued on.  Total cost of this project $0.

Bijou loves the object boxes at work.  She likes being able to read the words and match them to their object.  I could not imagine having additional tiny objects in the house, so I printed some pictures of objects and labels for her match.