So much of what we do in the Montessori classroom repeats itself week after week. I try to include new things we've done or new discoveries we've made in these posts.
We had fun recently playing with penguins again. Bear used the slotted spoon to get the penguins out of a bowl full of ice and water.
Visual discrimination activities are important pre-reading activities. Even though Bear is already reading, I thought it would be good for her to do this. I cut security envelopes I had been saving into squares of the same size, making sure I had two squares of each pattern.
Bear surprised me the other day by not being able to isolate ending sounds. I used a train to help her visualize what I meant. I am learning that Bear is a very visual learner like me.
She also surprised me by suddenly not "getting" rhymes (which she used to understand at 18 months to a few months ago so I don't know what happened). It seems like suddenly she is hung up over beginning sound as she told me that cat and cake rhymed because she could hear "c" in both. We've been playing memory using rhyming card pictures lately, but what has helped the most has been having her spell the words with the moveable alphabet and see if they "look" the same after the beginning consonant(s). This was another indicator to me that Bear is very visual. When I listen to people speaking Spanish (not my native language) I have to be able to see the words in my head to understand what they are saying. Thinking about this is what gave me the idea to spell the words for Bear to see.
Size discrimination. Bear has to evaluate the size cylinder she will need to make the tower match the colored circles.
She did a magnetic/non magnetic sort again one night while I made dinner and declared that the clothespin was both, so I got out a Venn diagram quickly to show her how we can sort things that have both qualities.
I'm linking up at One Hook Wonder and Mommy Moment for Montessori Monday.
I just noticed the other day that Sweet Pea also seems to think words that start with the same first letter rhyme. Isn't it funny what they get in their heads?
ReplyDeleteIt's great that you are able to teach based on Bear's style. I guess Bear is just trying to combine the concepts from print with the auditory patterns. One thing that always surprised me in Anna is how well she recognizes patterns in everything including complex patterns. This bodes well for learning, but I wonder what it means for the situations when she needs to "think out of the box" - she is not a big fan of "Not a Stick" exercises that you once wrote about. To her this is a stick - end of the story :)
ReplyDeleteL is the same way with ending sounds. It's like they aren't very important if we know what the word starts with. Now that she is reading it's getting a bit easier. Maybe we'll try the train thing as well and see how it goes.
ReplyDeleteShe's also a bit random with the rhyming. Sometimes she's great and then she totally picks something that doesn't sound alike at all. Maybe it's lack of concentration.
That's interesting about ending sounds. I'll have to pay attention and see if my son has the same issue. I was at Target today and found an alphabet bingo game in the dollar section, where the letters called out are things like "the last letter in DUC__." I'm going to play it with him next week.
ReplyDeleteJC sometimes guesses words based on context and meaning so she's not sounding out the entire word. Sometimes she knows with the first few letters. I think segmenting middle and ending sounds can be challenging.
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to figure out what kind of learner JC is. I'm a visual learner so I assumed she was too but her auditory skills are so much better than mine! She can regurgitate several pages of reading nearly word for word. I don't think I could ever do that. She also loves to touch everything and use movement in everything so she can be kinesthetic as well. So hard to tell.
@Joyful Learner: Some people are very good at all ways of learning. Bear also has good auditory skills as she also can regurgitate extremely well, but obviously for the end sounds and the rhymes the visual was added information that aided her. I also think there is so much information she is trying to process that she is overextending certain rules (like when a child says runned instead of ran) and only thinking of beginning sounds.
ReplyDeleteI think Tabitha can isolate ending sounds, your post has made me stop and think though.
ReplyDeleteI love the security envelope visual discrimination activity. If it wasn't still summer I would pull out my snowflake matching card game from last winter. I am curious as to whether Tabitha would notice the slight differences in some of the more complicated snowflakes that I didn't use last year.
Love to see all that you do.
Oh my goodness my boys would love that penguin activity - I'll definately be setting that one up! Short Pants had trouble with ending sounds as well for a long time; I think it must just be harder for lots of kiddos. Thanks for linking to Montessori Monday!
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