Small Spaces: Our learning corner

Hello! Today it's our turn on the "Small Spaces" Blog train, where you get to have a glimpse into various real spaces designed for children. Since we homeschool, the boys are home for a large part of the week. This means that our home spaces have to work very hard for us! You've probably read about our reading corner, and have seen part of the boys' bedroom… and today we'll be showing you the learning corner that we've carved out of our entryway. 

The entryway was actually corridor space, which the previous owner bought over. This used to act like our "garage", and there used to be shoes, balls and umbrellas scattered all over (you can see part of the mess in the before photo!). The space was doing nothing much, aside from being a catch-all for all our outdoor stuff (like the boys' bikes and scooters), so I decided to clean it up and use it as a learning corner. Here's how it looked like before, and after the clean-up:

We have a bench in the entry that nobody sat on (because it was usually piled high with stuff!), and I cleaned it up and used it as a nature table for the kids:

The table contains natural materials that the boys' get to play with: tree blocks (which the boys' Ah Kong kindly helped to saw for us), pebbles, as well as various things that the kids pick up on their walks. I use all sorts of wooden bowls, baskets and recycled fruit containers to keep these things organized. Sometimes, we throw in various animal figures (from these Toobs) for the kids to play with. 

Part of the nature table is lined with faux grass, which we purchased from Daiso. It gives an added sensory element to their play.

Their clay salamanders. More details here. 

To the right of the bench is a larger basket where we store their balls, as well as more nature materials. The baskets are from Daiso, as well as from the market at Sungei Road (which is a gem resource for baskets!)

Above the nature table is a picture ledge from Ikea, which we use to hold all the boys' smaller natural materials, as well as their magnifying glasses. The boys love picking all sorts of fruit and leaves and what not when they go on walks, and we sort and keep the stuff that doesn't decompose easily. These are held in Rajtan spice jars (from Ikea), as well as empty baby food jars (we sometimes use baby food when we travel, and I save the jars). 

Some of their nature-related artwork is displayed above the shelf, such as Junior J's painting of beetles, Lil J's veggie stamping on canvas (the canvas is from Daiso), and the butterflies that they've made. I also put up some vintage educational postcards on plant parts (from here). 

There was space to the right of the nature table, which I used to display the boys' aquariums: cardboard pieces painted to look like the sea, containing various sea creatures which they've made. We add new creatures to their aquariums occasionally. The toddler loves looking at these!

Top aquarium by Junior J, bottom aquarium by Lil J. Junior J's one even has a key!

Below the aquariums is an old Ikea frame that I've repurposed to allow us to display pictures. I'm planning to use this to introduce artists and their paintings to the kids, but for now they will just hold postcards from various parts of the world. Making this was easy: I just cut twine and pasted it to the back of the base of the frame using washi tape. The postcards are held up by wooden pegs from Daiso. 

We managed to squeeze in our sensory bin below that display. This is a Torkis clothes basket from Ikea, and by far the best container I've found for sensory play. It's tall enough to reduce spillage, and large enough to give all 3 enough space to play. I've found most other trays too shallow or small, or much too large. Best of all, it costs less than $8!

Right now the bin is empty, save for some tools that were from the kit from My Messy Box. 

The wall opposite to the nature table was empty, so I put up an adhesive blackboard strip (from Joli Petite). We have a blackboard wall in the house, but the boys mainly get to doodle on this one instead, as it is "outside" the house. This way, the dust gets more or less contained.

The boys use both regular chalk, as well as sidewalk chalk. I love the colors of the sidewalk chalk, as well as how these are nice and thick (which means they do not break easily!). This mini crate from Daiso is perfect for holding the chalk. 

On the side opposite to the main door is our mini garden, which sits atop of our shoe cabinet. The boys help to water the plants, but this is another area I would like to tidy and do up! Above the garden is our enamel tray display, which greets us when we enter the house (you can read more about this display here). 

All in all, this learning space is working well for us. Since this is "outside", the mess is more or less contained, which means I don't need to fret so much about dust (from the chalkboard) and sand (from the sensory bin). Also, the boys are trained to leave any natural materials at the nature table and not bring them indoors, so we are not so worried about soil and bugs getting into the house. There are just two drawbacks though. While this area gets plenty of sunlight, it also means it can get pretty hot, and we are thinking of installing a fan here. That aside, since this is just inside the main door, the boys sometimes get so distracted playing here that we can't get them to leave the house when we are headed out! 

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This post is part of the "Small Spaces" series that is hosted by this blog. Please click the button below to take a look at more children's spaces!

Next on the blog is Danessa Foo from PrayerFull Mum. Danessa is enjoying the new season in her life as a Stay-at-Home Mum, now that they are back in their homeland Singapore after being overseas for 2 years. Head over to her blog tomorrow, to find out how Danessa dealt with smaller spaces in her new "old" house after enjoying spacious living in America.

Weekend Wonderings: Project Simplify

We spent the weekend decluttering. I have mentioned before that both hubby and I have packrat tendencies, and our home was really bursting at the seams with stuff. All that stuff was getting to me: I couldn't find materials when I needed them for homeschool, we had a study that was unusable because there was waaay too many things stored in there, it was hard to clean when there were things covering various surfaces at home.

However, finding time to declutter was hard: there were the kids to take care of during the day, meals to cook, a house to clean, and my nights were spent catching up on housework and other matters. While I did try decluttering at night, those attempts hardly seemed to make a dent in our stuff. But recently I decided enough was enough. The hubby was on leave since the weekend, so we decided to do a massive decluttering exercise.

Recently I read about Marie Kondo's book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" (Aff link, the book is currently at 40% off! You can read a pretty good review and summary of the book here). I ended up purchasing a copy, and am in the midst of reading it. The book has been great. It explains clearly how (and why) to go about decluttering, and also includes tips on how to effectively organize and store what's left after you've gotten rid of all the extra stuff. One of the most helpful things from the book that stuck in my head was this idea:

"We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of."

Keeping this in mind really helped when deciding what to keep and what to give away or throw. Once you are clear about what you actually want to keep, giving away the rest was much easier.

Anyway, here are some tips from Marie Kondo which I found useful:

"In the majority of the households, items that fall into the same category are stored in two or more places scattered around the house... Gathering every item in one place is essential to this process because it gives you an accurate grasp of how much you have."

"In addition to the physical value of things, there are three additional factors that add value to our belongings: function, information and emotional attachment. When the element of rarity is added, the difficulty in choosing what to get rid of multiplies. People have trouble discarding things that they could still use (functional value), that contain helpful information (inforamtional value) and that have sentimental ties (emotional value). 

The process of deciding what to keep and what to discard will go much more smoothly if you begin with items that are easier to make decisions about. Clothes are the easiest because their rarity value is extremely low. The best sequence is this: clothes first, then books, papers, miscellaneous items (komono) and, lastly sentimental items and keepsakes."

So I took her advice and started decluttering our clothes and books. We switched it around by starting with our books, since I wanted to donate those off earlier to Dignity Mama Stalls. Hubby and I decluttered the books together. We are both book lovers, and we have tonnes of books (we have 6 Billy bookcases and 5 Expedit shelving units of various sizes). My parents very kindly took all three kids in the evening and we spent two hours or so just taking books off the shelves. In the end we cleared about 9 bags worth of books: many novels and Christian books (some even new ones which we never found the time to read), a whole pile of non-fiction reference books of various topics, and a couple of cookbooks. We did have quite an interesting time choosing what to keep and what to clear! Clearing the novels made sense: many of these were interesting, but chances are we probably would not have the chance to re-read them again, and if the kids wanted to read them next time, they could always borrow them from the library. However, we kept various classics, and stories that we've read over and over, like those by Tolkien, James Herriot and C.S. Lewis. After all that hassle of decluttering, I think we'd think twice before buying a novel in the future!

I moved on to the clothes on the next day. Decluttering clothes was definitely easier, and I cleared 4 large bags of clothes. The good stuff we'll be donating to the MINDS shop, and the old stuff I'll be cutting up to use as rags.

We still have a long way to go, but I think we're feeling much lighter as we continue this decluttering process! Are you decluttering your home too?