Classroom Shelf Tour: Lower Elementary Montessori
One of my favorite things about the prepared adult side of Montessori is setting up the prepared environment.
Each year at the beginning of the year, I will reset up my Lower Elementary Montessori classroom. I have been in my currently classroom for three years, and each year, I set it up differently. I mostly do this to improve the environment.
One thing I do that others don’t agree with is change up the classroom during the school year. Usually this isn’t planned, but it does happen. For example, after the Thanksgiving feast we have at the school, all the tables were out of my classroom for the feast, and I noticed that I could make the space more open if I moved some shelves, which now get used way more than they used to. Plus, there is more space for working and it made the space seem even larger.
In the classroom I was in the first couple years of teaching, I couldn’t change much because there were heaters that needed to be covered by shelves, so the shelfs where just around the walls. In my current classroom, I jutted shelves from outside of the walls and created math, Langauge, and cultural sections. Although how I did change the classroom recently, they are all along the walls, which is funny, since I thought I didn’t like it that way, but it just makes the most room in the space.
One thing I also change besides the shelves are work tables. I currently work in the classroom I attended when I was a child, so I have some emotion attachment to some of the furniture in the classroom. I use it to keep up the past, but I probably would just get rid of them, if it weren’t for that. The tables include a half of a hexagon, which I use to house our 5 laptops in our classroom. One is a table that was made for the classroom, and there used to be four of them, but right not there is only one left, so I don’t want to get rid of it. It is a wooden table, but someone painted it white on the top, but as the years progressed it wore out. I tried to cover it with sticker paper, but the students peel it. Anyway, I will keep these pieces of furniture, because they are sentimental.
I also had a student move to a different state this year and their family donated a ton of organizational containers, so I redid some of the classroom to account for that.
Speaking of that, I don’t know if this happens in your classroom, but I feel like I also get new and (sadly) lose students throughout the school year. Which means the number of students is forever changing. I bring this up because of the tables I use for lunch and snack. The students eat in the classroom, and since I had a larger number at the beginning of the year, I made them two separate tables to make more seat spaces. Then we had firefighters visit and I pushed the tables together, which prompted the students to ask for the tables to be put back with both tables the long way, so since a student moved, we can all fit around the table to long which. Which was what the third graders were excited for because that is how the tables were set up the last two years.
Math Shelf Tour
Here is a tour of my current math shelves. I like to have one shelf be addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The other shelves have numeration, time, money, measurements, plus the stamp game and the colored beads.
Here is a video to watch:
Geometry Shelf Tour
Language Shelf Tour
I had my language shelves set up the same way for two and a half years, but as I mentioned above I moved the shelves in November. It created more room, even thought the shelves are more spread out.