Toddler Activity

I remember how much Bear loved to put things through little openings, so this afternoon I cut a hole in an empty container and J-jo spent twenty minutes putting markers through the hole.

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Artists and Art Week 3 - Emily Carr

Emily Carr is my favorite artist.  I love the movement and rhythm she captures in her paintings of trees.  When I did my Masters in the Education of the Arts, we had a lot of art projects to complete and that year, I found myself going back to Carr for my inspiration.  Hence, why my nickname is thegirlwhopaintedtrees.  I started our family blog the year of the Masters program.  I know many of you wonder about my nickname and now you know.  The picture that shows up next to my name in comments on Blogger is one I painted during that program.  But I digress...

I introduced Bear to Carr by showing the paintings here.  We used my all time favorite Carr painting as our inspiration.

We looked up where Emily Carr lived on the map.  She actually studied in California and England, so there was a lot of looking at maps involved.  I told Bear about the room in the Vancouver Art Gallery (I grew up in North Vancouver) that is full of Emily Carr's trees and that when you walk through you just feel like you are in the forest.  I hope one day I can take Bear (and J-jo) to walk through the gallery with me.

I always do a practice piece first with my students, though not always in the same medium.  Bear did her practice piece in oil pastels and her actual piece with tempera paint.  We talked about the movement that the curves gave to the painting and that was Bear's criteria in making her painting - curves to create movement and filling the top to show the size of the tree.

Here is her art.

Her  practice piece - She was actually looking at a different Carr painting so she has sky and a mountain in there.

Working on the mountain.

The finished piece.

If you've done any art with your child this week based on an artist or illustration style, or taught some of the elements and principles of art, or studied a musician or any other type of artist, please join the Linky.  Please remember to link back or grab the button on the side bar.

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Tot School

J-jo is 13.5 months (more or less)

I didn't take as many photos this week and a lot of what we did can be seen in previous Tot School posts.

I am happy with my J-jo's aquisition of language.  I was always told that boys were slower with language, but so far I would say he is on par with Bear (when she was 13 months).  He has a lot of words and communicates things very clearly through signs and gestures.

He "reads" Where is Maisy with us, shaking his head and saying "non" when we lift the flap to see if it is Maisy.

He also can respond to commands, like "Go get a spoon," or "Rock the baby (doll)," or even "Find the cow" (though he hasn't done this for all the animals yet).

I'm even impressed with his fine motor skills and his ability to get a spoon or fork into his mouth.  Again, I thought these things took a lot longer with boys.  And, though he doesn't show much interest in drawing, he holds the crayon much better than Bear did at his age.

This particular morning J-jo was interested enough to draw for a few minutes.

 However, he'd rather climb all over the place than draw.

Pincer Grasp Activities

 Sensory

 He loves water play at the sink.  I love it because I can cut vegetables next to him. 

 He is always taking the shoes out of the shoe cubbies.  I lined them up for him showing him how the pairs matched.

To see what other tots are doing see 1+1+1=1

 

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Bear Wisdom

(photo from October 2009 - Neither of us really looks like this anymore.)

A long conversation between Bear and me follows.  She sounded so grown up talking to me and I wanted to remember this forever.  Bear wants to go to "real" school these days. The conversation is about this desire and how sad I'm feeling over it.

B- I want to go to real school.
M-Normal school like your friends or Montessori school?
B-Montessori school.
M- I thought you wanted to stay at home with Mommy.
B- I changed my mind.
M- Why!
B- Because I want to see what's on the shelves.
M- Oh.
Pause.
M- Won't you miss me?  I'm going to miss you!
B- No!
M- No? (I'm doing puppy eyes at this point and feeling like crying.)  But it's ALL day!
B- Mommy! I want to go to the school where you pick me up.
(We visited two schools in the Spring. One half day (far away) and one full day (close to us).  Bear is referring to the half day school. I think when I said all day she had visions of not being picked up?)
M- Oh, Sweetie, we pick you up at both schools!  At one we would pick you up at 12 and the other at 3 o'clock.
B- Come at 4.  I like 4.
M- No, I'd have to pick you up at 3.  Won't you miss me?
B- No.

M- Don't you love me anymore?
(What did I do?  Why does she want to leave me? I'm thinking sadly.)
B- I love you, Mommy.  I can still love you while I'm at school.

She can still love me while she's at school and she can love me yet not miss me.
But, I definitely can't love her without missing her. I don't think.

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Preschool Wrap up - Week 5

 Practical Life

 Helping mix muffins.

 Taking over the breading of the eggplant for our yummy eggplant parmesan sticks.  She likes hers in honey or yogurt dip.  They are deliciously crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside and don't taste like eggplant at all!

 

 Ladling with her new mini ladle.

 

Preparing Bento style snacks.  Cookie cutters are fun to use:)

 

 Loves the paper cutter.

Nuts and bolts.

Language

 

 Jumping over the phonograms Mommy called out.

 Bear sometimes completely takes me away by stubbornly deciding just what she wants to do.  It was 7:00 and bedtime and she started playing with the farm.  She saw my noun labels and just absolutely - wouldn't take a "tomorrow, Bear," as an answer - had to write her own labels.  I decided to follow her lead and push bedtime back a bit. She used the sandpaper letters to help her with formation and we listened for the sounds in each word together.  Notice she chose to write "bunny" and not "rabbit."  "Not rabbit, I call them bunny," she told me.

 (sorry about the blur)

 She did all 6 of them in a row and wanted to keep going but it was by now almost 8:00.

Math

 

 The bead stair.

 The new hundred board.  The magnetic hundred board is now on the fridge.  We need to work on the teens some more.  She can count fine rote 1 to 20, but in isolation can't name them.

 Art

 We did two Paul Klee projects (one of which Bear initiated herself) that will be posted in a couple of weeks.  (I got ahead so I could schedule a bunch of posts for the Artists and Art linky in case we couldn't get to art one week.)

For more preschool ideas visit the Preschool Corner, and for more Montessori ideas visit One Hook Wonder.

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Music Appreciation - Mozart

 painting by Barbara Krafft from Music with Ease

As we are learning Twinkle, Twinkle on the violin, it was appropriate for us to learn a bit about Mozart this week.  We read a very neat biography of him written kind of like a fairy tale.

When Mozart was three he would stand on his tiptoes to reach the piano keys.  He already knew what notes sounded good together.  He could play the violin just by listening to others play. He wrote his first song at 5 and his first symphony at age 8!

We also read Play, Mozart, Play!  a cute little picture book about Mozart.  

We've been listening to CDs of Mozart music in the car and to Mozart on pandora.com.  

Every once in a while we pull out our musical instrument three-part cards and look at the different instruments and try to identify them in a piece that is playing.

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Learning Math through Violin...

...but not in the way you might think...

Bear needed just a little bit more motivation to behave appropriately during violin practice and lessons.  With math in mind, as well as financial planning for preschoolers, I decided to give her 1 penny for every exercise well performed.  So far, it is working well.  She wants a dollar so badly so she can shop in the Target dollar spot for stickers.  (I will pay the tax this time.)  Every time she gets 5 pennies, she trades it in for a nickel.  Once she has five pennies and one nickel, she trades it in for a dime.  Soon she'll be trading for a quarter.  She ends up earning about 6 to 10 cents per practice.  She doesn't always remind me to give her the penny, so sometimes I don't since ultimately I want her to have intrinsic motivation for practicing.

After her first dollar is spent, we will talk about how she might want to save up for a bigger purchase (that's where the financial planning for preschoolers comes in). 

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Artists and Art Week 2 - Wassily Kandinsky Part 3

Our last Wassily Kandinsky project (for now) was to study lines (thick, thin, wavy, straight, zigzag, stippled, dotted, dark, light and so on) and paint some while listening to music.  We then chose colors to add to our lines.  The goal was to use bright colors.  We chose to listen to The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint Saens, as we had recently been inspired to by About a Girl and had spent the entire evening before learning about the instruments and animals in the piece, as well as coloring the animals that About a Girl so generously shared with me.

First, I reminded her where Kandisky was born and we looked it up on the map.

Then, I showed Bear this painting and this painting by Kandinsky.  I asked her what shapes and types of lines she could see in the paintings and asked her about colors too.  I asked her which painting looked brighter, which had more colors, what colors she could see.  I didn't bother printing them out.

I showed her a poster depicting different kinds of lines I had made when I taught third and fourth grade art.

This gave her a lot of inspiration when I challenged her to show as much variety of types and thicknesses in her painting.  (One thing I was taught was to challenge the students with criteria to meet - this is what helps them grow as artists.)

That above was her practice run.  I then gave her a 12x18 piece of watercolor paper to paint on and we turned on the music.

She always looks serious when she is concentrating. The broad stripes are the lion (as narrated by Bear as she painted) and the squiggle is the hen.

We let our paintings dry (I was participating on my own paper) and then added color.

The finished work.

I actually did a 6 week version of this with a sixth grade class during my student teaching days.  In that unit we looked at lines in poetry and lines in art and played around with composition and how changing just one line can change a poem and a painting, and also how colors can change the mood of something. The culminating project was painting to music in much the same way Bear did but over two days.

If you've done any art with your child this week based on an artist or illustration style, or taught some of the elements and principles of art, or if you've studied a musician or other type of artist, please join the Linky.  Please remember to link back or grab the button on the side bar.

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Montessori Monday - More Fall Practical Life Trays

Some of these will look familiar to the ones posted last week.  Changing a spoon to tongs and changing the dishes around usually offers enough variety that a child will be compelled to work with the activity some more.  

Tongs with felt leaves from Hobby Lobby.  Dishes from Michaels.

Spoon with fall colored pompoms.  Pompoms and acorn dishes from Michaels.

Cards and counters using fabric leaves (JoAnns) as the counters.

 Making patterns with felt leaves (Hobby Lobby)

Felt leaf stickers.  I wrote numbers on the backings of the stickers and now they can be sequenced.

These are the same leaves as in the previous activity.  One side is thus for patterns, the other for sequence.

Not really Fall, but very challenging pouring exercise.  Bear really had to concentrate to not over pour (and she is an expert pourer).  I will have her make more of these juice "popsicles" until she can do it without spilling at all.  Her little spills became an eyedropper exercise as she sucked up the spilled juice on the rim of the ice tray and transferred it to an empty spot.

Linked at:

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