What Bear is Reading

Here are some books we enjoyed this week.  

 

This has always been one of my favorite books.  As a teacher, I aspired to encourage and empower my students and the teacher in this book does this so cleverly by getting the little girl to sign the paper on which she has jabbed her pen to make a dot.  Bear quite enjoyed this one too and asked for it repeatedly.

The Odd Egg is a cute story about a duck who finds an egg and waits for it to hatch.  It doesn't have much text, but the illustrations are appealing, as is the surprise inside the egg:)

Two sweet mice are on their way to a party when they realize they left the present behind and have to find a substitute.  I love that they live in a mailbox and use a letter as a sled.  Both Bear and I loved the illustrations.  Another one short on text.  I think I inundated Bear with long books a while back, so it has been refreshing to read lighter fare.

This story tells the story of some sweet moments between a cub and his father walking home.  The illustrations are warm and endearing and appealed to Bear right away.  I love books with fabulous illustrations.

And the last one for this post is

 

A counting book about the Arctic set to the tune of "Over in the Meadow."  Need I say more?  It also has lovely illustrations.  I am looking forward to checking out more in the series (Way out in the Desert, Over in the Garden, and Somewhere in the Ocean).

To se what others are reading, visit Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

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The "School" Corner

Practical Life

 

  

 

spooning

pouring

spreading 

cutting

Sensorial
 

knobless cylinders

The cylinders were placed on this "caterpillar" I drew.  She loved building the caterpillar.

cylinder blocks

Bear takes out her cylinder blocks daily. (You can see it here in action, but this isn't my Bear; it's just to give you an idea of how much thinking goes on to accomplish this. ) She is even doing the fourth block which is quite challenging.

 

 

feel and find

We focus on just a few shapes at a time.  She wants to look and find and not feel and find right now, so I actually have her find them through the material as opposed to sticking her hand in the bag.

 

playdough 

 We made bread dolls out of playdough a while back.  This week, Bear has been playing with her cousin and they've been making cakes with their abuelo (grandfather).

Language

moveable alphabet work

I like to show Bear how we use letters to build words, even though she isn't quite ready to build them herself.  With prompting she can tell me the ending sounds, but not the middle sound yet.  We need to do more vowel work.

We did this particular work before everyone woke up one morning as I sipped a cup of tea.  It was nice to have super quiet time together.

My moveable alphabet is actually sturdy scrapbooking letters from the dollar spot at Target.  I bought a few packs and we can build lots of words.  I just need a way to store them now.

Reading

I try to read to her and her cousin before lunch each day. We went back to storytime.  I had a proud mommy moment seeing how well Bear sat focused on the stories the librarian was reading. 

 

beginning sound sorts

(This photo is when we were still in Costa Rica.)

 

stencils 

This fits into more than one category, but I was thinking prewriting and stuck it with the language stuff.  Inspite of all the activities we do to practice the pincer grasp, Bear insists on a fist grasp when holding a writing instrument.  I had just asked her to hold her pencil correctly before taking the picture. These are yogurt lids.

Math
 

This was inspired by Sid the Science Kid this morning.  It was an episode on making charts, so we grabbed a handful of pattern blocks and sorted them, then I drew her a chart.  She loved this extension of the episode.

 

Montessorians use the farm to teach grammar.  So I thought, why not use it to teach math too:)  We were sorting farm animals and using the Gaddy Nipper crayons we won to count them.  The photo is blurry because I am teaching Bear to use the camera and she took this picture.

 

We ordered our hearts using the number line.

Geography

 

  

 

Continent work and enjoying our favorite garden in Costa Rica (this was last week the day before we flew.) These beautiful ox carts are hand painted and were once used to haul coffee to the ports.

To see what others are doing in preschool see Homeschool Creations.

To see what others are doing for Montessori Homeschool see One Hook Wonder.

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Busy...but here's our "school" corner

I'm spending my evenings watching these, rather than blogging.  Hope to be back with pictures shortly though.  :)

Here's a quick wrap up:

Language
The first thing I wanted to do when we arrived to GA was go to the library:)  We accidentally happened to be there right for story time.  Bear LOVED it!  (We didn't have story time in Costa Rica, though not for the lack of trying.)  I signed out SO many books for Bear.  My husband actually had me put some back on the shelf.  chuckle.  So we've been reading so much and it has been so great to have fresh reading material.

Montessori Sensorial Work

I introduced the first cylinder block to Bear and she proceeded to do the next two blocks too.  Still working on the quietness of the exercise.  We have nowhere to set up our materials, so she pulls them out from under the bed when she wants them.  It's kind of funny, but it works.  She loves them and is excited for tomorrow when I will introduce the red knobless cylinders.  

Prewriting Skills
She's also been using yogurt lid stencils to draw shapes.

Science and Math
Bear is playing with her new balance scale.  She color sorted the weights so that the yellow, blue, and green were on one side of the balance and the red ones were on the other side.   This was totally self-initiated.  Obviously one side went down and the other went up.  I asked her how she might get the other side to go down and she answered, "with my hand" and then proceeded to push it down:)

She has a tray out for number sequencing.  It's the same as Melissa did on Chasing Cheerios.  Bear sorted too, though without the chopsticks. 

Practical Life
I set up a tray for spoon work.  (I hit the Target Dollar Spot as soon as I got here LOL)  It's a simple one of glass beads being spooned into a heart shaped silicone ice cube tray. 

So that was Thursday, Friday, and the weekend.  Bear has been playing nonstop with her "younger" cousin (they are 4.5 months apart).  They'd only played together once before a year ago, but they hit it off right away and are now inseparable.  It's been great that Bear has had someone to play with daily. 

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Brr. It's Cold Outside

When you are used to the warm climate of Costa Rica, arriving in Atlanta in the middle of January can be quite a shock. 

I will be taking a short break until I figure out how to do "school" at my in laws house. 

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More Practical Life

Some practical life I have set up for our last week in Costa Rica.

Slipping buttons through a slit in a lid on a tin can.

(This idea was borrowed from Leptir, a wonderful Montessori blog)

Using tweezers to transfer pompoms from one baby food jar to another, which she did last week too.

Key in a lock.

Nuts and Bolts.

Lining up flat marbles on popsicle sticks. This one is good for hand-eye coordination.

Dry pouring of beans.

Spooning of beans

Pouring of buttons

(a Bear request - she tells me which new activities she wants out on her shelf at night when she is falling asleep. I added the tweezers for her to try, but she never uses them more than for a couple tries.))

Pouring of marbles

Pouring water from the pitcher to the bowl, in preparation for face washing.
She's mastered hand washing already and now we need to work on the face washing, especially the wringing out of the washcloth.

Lining up buttons on the popsicle sticks


Bear always chooses the pouring and spooning and largely ignores the lock and nuts and bolts.  
We haven't gotten to the pouring water from the pitcher to the bowl yet, but she did wash all the lunch dishes for me - and no, I'm not kidding; she actually said, "Mommy, get bowl on island, still have to wash more dishes, Mommy!" and proceeded to ask for all the dishes still on the table.  My husband happily stated, "Oh good, I won't have to do dishes anymore!" LOL.

This is linked up to Montessori Monday at One Hook Wonder.

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Winner of Adentro y Afuera

Congratulations to 

abc

who said...

I'm a subscriber. I want to teach my daughter Spanish, but don't speak it well myself. We are slowly learning together. This would be a great resource!

Please contact me as soon as you can with your mailing address so I can forward it to Whistlefritz.

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More Awards

I love getting awards! Thank you so much Mi Escuelita Montessori and Leptir for this:

Make sure you visit these wonderful Montessori blogs!

For this award you have to list 10 things that make you happy and tag another 10 people.

Here's 8 things I came up with:
 

1. Cuddling my daughter and son

2. My husband.  He makes me laugh all the time!

3. Hearing my kids laugh.

4. A cup of hot tea

5.  Reading (books and blogs!)

6.  Writing

7. Sewing

8. Doing art, especially with Bear

Choosing 10 blogs out of a Google Reader full of exceptional blogs is quite the challenge.  I'm going to choose the blogs whose authors always leave me comments that make me smile, or who have helped me with all my Montessori questions lately.  They aren't in any order.

1. Walk Beside Me

2. Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns

3. Tired, Need Sleep

4. One Hook Wonder

5. Mama Smiles

6. inspiration Surrounds....Creativity Abounds

7. Tired, Need Sleep (edit: Guess I was tired and needed sleep when I typed this! haha!) 
    April Flowers is what I meant.

8. My Bilingual Boys

9. Counting Coconuts

10. Montessori Moments

Thank you to everyone who leaves comments.  They are very appreciated!

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The "School" Corner

This week focused much on practical life and sensory experiences.  Bear did a lot of painting and drawing and "writing" of lists.  We counted throughout the day as we played or read books (I try to choose something in a few of the illustrations we can count).

Practical Life

Transferring eggs from one carton to another.  Notes from the trenches: Do not ask your toddler/preschooler to help you with this if she is tired or she will test her limits when asked to please remember to transfer them gently.  Fortunately there were no broken eggs, but this work did have to be removed from her.

The next day we used the pink egg carton to spoon marbles into.  This would also fit into the math category as it teaches one-to-one correspondence.  And of course, we counted her marbles.

Transferring a mix of beans, corn, and garbanzo beans one by one with her fingers (she has the tweezers in this photo, but it was too challenging so she switched to fingers).

Sorting the beans and corn.

Spooning beads onto her glue.

Pouring beads back into original container, then deciding that this was a fun activity she continued to pour back and forth about ten times.

I had a bunch of teeny tiny pompoms Bear had yet to play with, so I presented it to her as "icecream" and she tweezed (can't that be a verb?) the pompoms into the other bowl, serving me icecream that we then scooped using a spoon to pretend to eat it.

Language

A spontaneous sound sort with our pipecleaner letters.

We read lots of stories this week (today alone I read Ira Sleeps Over 5 times!) and sang a lot of songs.

We may have done another sound sort, but this department kind of got shortchanged.

Math

Sorting buttons.  I thought she would sort by shape, but she wanted to sort by color.

This idea came from My Montessori Journey. (can't find the correct link, sorry, but the cards are from Making Learning Fun.  Then I cut out the shapes from white felt.  You're supposed to make the snowflake.)

  It didn't interest Bear for long.  But I actually enjoyed putting the snowflakes together.

After a power outage, we had lots of little candles around that I hadn't had a chance to put away.  I asked Bear if she thought they would all fit on the felt board, and she predicted that no, they would not.  She was right, only 9 of the 12 candles fit. 

Spindle Box revisited.  This time I used baby food jars (remember the 75 lids - okay so I'm at 80 something now) to hold the "spindles".  She liked this and still wanted to give some to zero, even though she understands "zero means nothing".

We also did this counting activity and we play this game daily.

Sensory

We played a "Mystery Bag" type game with these and talked about different textures.  She would close her eyes and try to feel the texture I asked for. (Shiny and smooth and sleek, stretchy and soft, soft and velvety, soft and puffy, bumpy and rough, rough and scratchy.)

Lots of playdough - one of the reasons that less "formal language" got done this week (well, the teething brother doesn't help either).  Here she put beads on toothpicks stuck in the playdough (sorry, meant candles on birthday cakes!)

Here we stuck beads right into the playdough.  We had white "snow" dough, but I made her some red dough since we are nearing Valentine's Day.  So after mixing the two Bear had her favorite color pink and we talked about darker and lighter.

Science

Bear loves these color mixing wheels.  You put them on the spinner and spin and you see the new color. 
(They are from this color game from which we took the pieces to use in her alphabet drawers.)

I also showed Bear how you can inflate a balloon if you stretch it over a bottle in which you've put baking soda and vinegar.  No picture as my hands were very busy and the Mister was busy holding the fussy baby.

This is linked at Preschool Corner and at Toddler Tuesday.

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