Montessori Monday

It doesn't seem like Bear touched the Montessori shelves much this past week.

We've been doing more make-believe playing or playing with J-jo.  He's at an age where he needs a little bit more interaction and directed stimulation than before.  It makes the whole preschooling-at-home thing difficult.  I really don't know how other moms do it!

We also tried to use J-jo's nap time for art a lot more this week.

 

 We were at JoAnn's during our tree week and somehow Bear managed to convince me that she "needed" this Toob of trees.  So we used the trees while playing with her train, but also tried to sort them according to shape.

I tried to encourage Bear to do the stereognostic bag a few times.  Here she's matching fabrics (without looking).  The fabrics each have distinctive feels to them.

We did a few activities with frogs (from Target a few months back).  We counted them, matched them, counted by twos with them, and reviewed odd and even numbers.

 

 Bear did a lot of pouring of rice this week and at one point she wanted to pour it into her scale.  I used this as a teachable moment and we weighed the rice properly using the weights.

Bear is completely into measuring EVERYTHING!.  She walks around my husband's measuring tape and is constantly saying, "Let me measure (insert name of object here)."

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We Play - Puppets

We love our cardboard house and recently we discovered it makes a terrific puppet theater.  Bear has been enjoying putting on (very short) puppet plays for J-jo.

And upon announcing "The End" all the puppets come flying out of the theater! lol

Come over and play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up

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Making up her own activities

The day the thousand cubes came, Bear kept herself occupied with her own activity.  How many thousand cubes fit in her nesting cubes?  I love to see her in self-directed exploration like this.

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Teeny Tiny Tot School

Although J-jo is still less than a year old, Bear and I have a lot of opportunities to teach him throughout the day.  Here are some things we play with him to help him learn things like colors, shapes, prepositions, and fine motor skills all while having fun!

In and Out.
J-jo loves to drop things into this jar.  Hexagons from the pattern blocks and cylinders from his wooden blocks.  We talk about the colors as he drops things in.  This activity is really good for his hand eye coordination and he loves it.

He tries to stack his barrels because I am always stacking them for him to knock down.  As he plays at this he refines his hand-eye coordination as well.

The latches board is really Bear's toy, but she never plays with it anymore.  However, J-jo loves this.  He can't do the latches, but he can open and close some of the doors if they are left propped open by part of the latch.  Bear and I tell him "open" and "close" as he plays with the doors.

Here he is learning the word "soft" as he strokes the bear.

In and out, open and close with an old jewelry box and some cubes.

In and out, open and close with a little book that came with a small puppy toy.

And his first sensory tray.  I put some flour on his tray and he enjoyed feeling it.

and trying to eat it:)

Check out other tot ideas at 1+1+1=1

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Books about Money

The Purse by Kathy Caple was a cute book about a little girl letting herself be influenced by her older sister to by a purse.  She is a determined little girl who knows what she wants and what she wants is the jingle of her coins in a bandaid box. Bear and I acted out the story with the coins in her cash register.  It was a lot of fun.

 The Penny Pot by Stuart L. Murphy was maybe not the most interesting story, but it lent itself well to matching coins. 

Then we had to sort the coins back into the cash register.

Bunny Money by Rosemary Wells was my personal favorite.  Max and Ruby are too funny.  We printed the bunny money from Rosemary Wells' website.  Putting the money together was good practice in cutting and gluing for Bear

I folded some red cardstock to make Bear wallet like in the story.  I glued the edges shut and added a tiny velcro circle so that the wallet would stay shut when folded. Then we went "shopping."

To see what others are reading, visit  What My Child is Reading, Read Aloud Thursday, and Feed Me Books Friday.
Also linked up at:

 

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Cupcake Liner Flowers (and reading before 3)

Right now I'm aiming for two things with Bear.  A few pages* of Progressive Phonics during J-jo's morning nap and art during his afternoon nap.  Even though she'll only read two pages of PP a day, and we're only on page 15 of the first book, I can already see an increase in fluency with those CVC words.  

Here's her naptime creation from today.  The inspiration came from here.

 She used cupcake liners, decorated with Do-A-Dot markers. She used a cotton ball to sponge pale blue on the background.  I cut stems and leaves out and Bear glued them where she wanted.

It's a very cheerful project and Bear loves to play with cupcake liners.

*(Now before some of you think I'm pushing Bear to read too young, I'd like to say that I am following her lead.  She has shown an interest in reading and enjoys playing with words and rhymes and letters.  She learned letter sounds before I was ready to teach them to her; she seemed to just absorb them from alphabet books and from me endlessly talking and saying things like "Baby -b-b-b" as I played with language with her.

On a day that I had printed out the CVC egg cards, intending them for a year or so down the road, Bear came over to me and sounded some of them out.  I had been showing her how we can write words, using the moveable alphabet just to show her, not thinking she would actually grasp any of it, but she did.  We still use the moveable alphabet, but doesn't work on it on her own the way she would in a Montessori classroom. I am only a quasi-Montessorian - I believe strongly in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and so I am not opposed to showing her something a little beyond her grasp.

And so that leaves me with a almost 3 year old kind of ready for reading and kind of not and I wondered if I should continue or stop until an arbitrary age.  I told myself we'd keep going even if some days she really isn't interested. All I ask of her is to read me two pages (and if you are familiar with PP that really translates only into 3 to 7 words per page in the early volumes.)

I don't have any interest in her being able to read early readers per say, but if you don't use a skill you lose it, so at the least I want her reading some sort of words daily for now.)

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Bunny Money

Joyful Learner recently posted about the book Bunny Money.  She did a wonderful activity with her daughter of photocopying the money in the book and using it to play out the story.  For those of you who would like to do the same activity, let me save you the time of photocopying them.  The Bunny Money is available to print out on Rosemary Wells' wonderful website.

Enjoy!

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We Play - Shopping

Playing shopping is such a great learning experience.  It is a great lesson in money, coin values, making change, not buying more than you can afford, people skills (saying good afternoon and thank you and have a nice day to the cashier).  We used to play market day a lot in Costa Rica.  We played with colones and Bear had learned the difference between some of the coins there.  Now she's learning a whole new set of coins.  American ones.  She loves the calculator on the cash register she received as an early birthday gift.  When you ask her how much something is, she looks at the numbers and tells you one and presses it.  I showed her how to press the plus sign to add the numbers.

Come over and play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up

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Montessori Monday

Sensorial

Enjoyed doingthe binomial cube, but enjoyed the challenge of the trinomial even more.

This is a great game in which you listen to animal sounds and have to find the matching animal card.

A game we have came with these color spinners that Bear loves.  I wanted to know if she remembered which colors mixed to make what color, so I set up a game in which she chose the secondary color chip before spinning the wheel.  If she chose correctly, she got to keep the chip.  She got them all.

These packages of flowers (from dollar spot at Target, reduced to a quarter!) are meant for scrapbooking. This day we used them for patterning.  I started a sequence and she continued it.

Bear made a collage with the leaves and bark and twigs she had collected from our unit on trees.

Practical Life

Weaving - this idea came from prekinders and My Montessori Journey.  We only did it once as it was not interesting enough to bear to repeat. 

Do you know the book Mouse Count in which the snake catches the mice and puts them in a jar?  Well this game is called Snake Count, in which Bear catches snakes (with chopsticks) and places them in a jar.

Writing and Reading

While cleaning out the "school" and toy cupboard, we came upon these foam pieces to build letters.  So Bear built letters and traced letters for awhile.

This book from Valerie at Frugal Family Fun Blog is Bear's obsession right now.  I actually can't get her to the Montessori shelves because she is SO enthralled in tracing everything in the book.  She also never wants me to take a picture.  "Not for the blog, Mommy!" she exclaims.  Oh well, what can I say, I sneaked a picture.)

 

Using alphabet stickers found at Target brought a new twist to the moveable alphabet and renewed her interest in spelling words for me a little bit.

Math

I presented her the ones, tens, and hundreds and we played a game I've played with my third graders that Joyful Learner calls Race to One Hundred.  You roll the die, add that number of ones.  When you have ten ones, you trade the ones in for a ten.  You play until you have ten tens or one hundred.  Getting Bear to finish the last two tens was a bit of a challenge as she had lost interest by then.

 Bear tried tracing numbers in corn flour.  Although she can trace her sandpaper numbers perfectly, she can not transfer to the tray.  Any ideas?

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