The Wall

Earlier this month I wrote about a rearrangement of the housekeeping area in the playroom.  You can read about it here.

As I had hoped, moving the half wall has greatly improved the traffic flow between play areas.  The new placement has enhanced the use of the ‘drive thru’ order window making customer service much easier and the old computer keyboards are great cash registers too.

There has also been another interesting development.  Making tents/forts under the loft has long been a popular activity.  The push-in type towel holders that were included in the loft design made it easy to hang blankets for tents;

After I moved the housekeeping area wall, the children made another discovery that reignited their interest in building tents and forts;

In the previous post I had also mentioned that I was considering adding textured items to the blank side of the divider wall.  Many, many years ago we used to have an ‘activity wall’.  It was a wall that we had built in the archway between the living room and dining room of my home.  At that time I was using the dining room as the main playroom so I had built in activities to that side of the wall.  This was how it looked back in 2002;

The old “Activity Wall” contained various little doors with latches that the children could open and find surprises.  There were also wooden bead mazes and other games that the children could use.  The old wall changed over time as some items were removed and others were added.

Then when the playroom underwent a major renovation many of the wall items were eliminated or incorporated in various areas throughout the playroom instead of being grouped together.  Now that the half wall of the housekeeping area has been relocated I decide to add some items to this wall.  I planned this as a ‘texture’ wall instead of an ‘activity’ wall and so far it looks like this;

It has items that are soft or hard, shiny or dull, smooth or rough, plain or patterned and more. There are circles, squares, rectangles and only one triangle – something that the children noticed almost right away.  This is only the beginning; I expect that the items on this wall will change over time too.  We’ll see.