This past weekend I experienced a truly rare occurrence, something that seldom ever happens, something that us homeschooling Moms see very little of....are you ready.....

for a whole day, I got to be ALONE.

Yes, I said alone, all by myself, nobody here but me, an entire day dawn to dusk, just listening to the quiet air, staring at myself in a mirror and wondering....what does one do with themselves when they are all alone for a day?  NO, truth be told, I had this day planned out, after all, you'd better have a plan for special opportunities like this.

Anyone who has a toddler or preschooler understands that opportunity doesn't frequently knock and time doesn't regularly present itself to do special projects, ones that require great attention and focus.  So I took this opportunity to complete a project that I've been wanting to get set up for a long time.  On Saturday, I worked in my schoolroom from 10:00am to 6:00pm setting up what I've come to call my "busy bookshelf".

As you may know, it is a great challenge to homeschool two older children with a toddler running around looking for things to entertain themselves.  Either you end up with a destroyed homeschool room, or a whiney crying bored toddler, or both!  Which results in one stressed out Mom and two frustrated school children.  So, this project was of upmost importance.  And now, two days into using this system, I know why... it has been an absolutely fantastic help to our school day!

Before organizing this, I had two (you can see the other one to the right of the photo above) loaded down bookshelves full of books.  And busy toys/activities scattered in various places throughout the schoolroom, playroom and rest of the house, in no particular order, all messed up, the lacing beads mixed in with play cooking stuff, and puzzle pieces mixed with Playdoh, etc.

Since taking on a new philosophy of homeschooling, I have also been driven to simplify, simplify, and simplify more.  And I recently came to the realization that I wasn't using half of the books I had on my shelf, and it was time to say goodbye to them.  So I first went through both bookshelves, filling an entire huge box full of items to sell or giveaway.  Therefore condensing it all down to one bookshelf and leaving wide open the other.  Then came the arduous task of finding and sorting through all the busy playthings and placing them in organized fashion on the shelf.

On the top shelf I have a box with Gabby's Aquadoodle floor pad.  And to the right of that are empty containers (baskets, pails, etc.) for placing items to play with and sorting and such.  And to the right of that are two lap trays for the kids to use when they are sitting somewhere other than a table; and a metal cookie sheet for those magnetic toys.

On the next shelf we have coloring books, crayons; a box of notebooks, stickers, inexpensive watercolor paints with brushes and paper cups for water, Do-A-Dot Art stamps, and washable markers; and two boxes of blocks, one the standard alphabet blocks, the other are wooden animal memory game blocks.

The next you'll find a pile of various puzzles; a box full of misc. puzzle type items such as pattern blocks and puzzles, counting bears, tangram puzzles, Unifix cubes, and a bucket of lacing beads; and last on this shelf, as you can see, is a box of Playdoh and tools.

Moving on down we find some learning manipulatives such as magnetic letter tiles, alphabet and equals/opposites puzzles, a box with transportation vehicle magnets, a lacing shoe, bingo alphabet and farm animal games, and basic flash cards (shapes, colors, first words, etc.); and lastly on this shelf is our collection of toddler-friendly board books.

On the next shelf we find a box of all sorts of cooking play items; a Leapad; a box of Legos; and a box of cars with playmats.

And finally, on the bottom shelf, we find Tinkertoys; Lincoln Logs; a small box of Magnetix; a box of plastic play creatures (hey, what's that airplane doing in there?); and an abacus.

 Here are the THREE rules concerning this busy bookshelf:

• PERMISSION must be obtained for items to be removed from the shelf (the toddler isn't allowed to get items off the shelf by herself at all)
•  Generally only ONE item comes off per child at once.  One has to go back before another comes off.  
•  These items are strictly for use during schooltime, unless Mom otherwise specifies.

So far I've had to frequently send out reminders of these rules, especially to the youngin'.  But I feel with consistent patterns she'll get it.

As I said above, we've used this system for two days, and so far it has worked fantastic!!  Keeping the toddler busy and happy was my biggest challenge so far this schoolyear and this has been a life-saver!  I simply have to take the time to keep things moving to Gabby during studies with the older kids, but she has been quite happy with this because there is plenty of variety for her.  And some of the items are being used to keep the "hands-on" type learner older kids busy too while we have read-aloud times.