{Small Spaces} A shared play area

Home learning tends to mean loads of learning materials and books to be stored. How do mums keep everything organized such that something can be easily retrieved when needed? Today, we have Angeline to share her kids' play area with us.

Angeline is a stay-at-home-mom to two wonderful children, who love to test her patience on a daily basis. She loves cooking and doing home learning activities with her children, and blogs about her parenting and culinary adventures over at Simply Mommie. 

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This is my kids' space in their room. Apart from their beds and wardrobes which are on the other side of the room, here's the actual place where they hang out to play together or read a book.

It includes a small bookshelf with board books at the lowest level for my baby to grab (I placed the I Wonder Why series there too for stability of the bookshelf!)

A closer look of the Ikea trays:

I've labelled them so that it's easy for us to locate items for home-learning and for playing. The small blue trays at the very top are Montessori life-skills activities which I used to do with my girl but are far too unsafe for the baby now (small beads, pompoms etc.) so they are shelved right at the top.

And the rest of the books which I can't fit into the book shelf go on the shelf by the window (the collection has expanded since I took the photo a couple of weeks back).

The kids love to play at the pretend kitchen set, and I've set the kitchen play stuff tray nearest to the kitchen set for ease of use:

Sometimes they play separately - the boy continues to play while the girl gets some quiet reading done:

And after awhile, they tend to want to do the same stuff:

Besides their room, the kids also play in the hall and we keep some random toys there too, and sometimes the kitchen set gets shifted out into the hall when we need them to be in our line of sight and not up to no good in the room together.

We have two other kids' tables that they are found at every day too, one in the hall and one in another room where I keep the activity books in a large bookshelf.

 

That's my little boy practising his 'writing' at the kids' table in the study room. We placed the Ikea table and chairs in this room so that the kids can do their 'work' while we work in the same room, if need be. But sometimes they want to have a change of environment and choose to do their activities here (instead of in the hall), which I allow if I'm free to supervise them closely in the room. We have another table in the hall where they do their 'work' when we need them to be in the hall (usually in the night after dinner, when we are busy clearing up the dinner table) and they use this space for writing or painting: 

Kid's working quietly together.

Painting

And that's how we organise the kids' spaces in the house - we have corners for them pretty much everywhere in the house for my convenience, as I may need to do some chores in the day and I wouldn't want them to go unsupervised for too long!

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Their play area's organized, don't you think? And I love how happy they look playing and learning together! Do you have a small space to share? Drop us a note at john(dot)jus(at)gmail(dot)com, and we'll have it featured here, and come by tomorrow to get a glimpse into a new playroom!