When we first moved into our house, I set up a classroom. My classroom was my pride. However, last year it started to become an embarrassment. It was no longer neat and organized, as I had started to store non-learning related things in the closet and elsewhere around the room. Then, last summer my in-laws moved and our classroom turned into a storage room. After much pleading from my children, yesterday, I decided to try and restore some of our classrooms former appeal.

I had been working in the classroom for approximately five minutes, when our little angel came into the room, took an alphabet puzzle off the shelf and quietly started to work on it. Shortly, thereafter her two brothers came into the room. Her older brother started by helping me, but ended by busying himself with an activity from the shelf. Her younger brother squatted next to his sister and tried to help her. She quietly and patiently helped him to place the pieces he picked up into the puzzle frame. After a short while, Patrick tired of doing the puzzle, gravitated towards a shelf, took something down and started working on it. When he was finished, he took something else down and started working on it. Pretty soon, our two older children came into the room and busied themselves with an activity.

As I cleaned, I looked around the room at my five children and all of a sudden I realized that our classroom wasn’t a classroom at all. Rather, the room, I was cleaning, is a learning room. Last night, as we were getting the children ready for bed, I explained to my husband that the classroom had a new name, the learning room, because our house was a learning house.

This morning, as I was eating breakfast, Brendan came to me and asked, “Mommy, when can we use the learning room, again?” I love little ears that hear conversations and embrace, in their mind, ideas that they like.