Usually, the Montessori presentation for prepositions is done with a silk flower and a vase; however, since we have been rowing Corduroy this week for J-jo, I changed up the presentation a bit and used a small teddy bear and a tiny shopping bag.
I followed the presentation from a file called "The Primary Grammar Cabinet" by Josh Galarza but presently I can't find a link for it. He presents a story for each symbol explaining why the symbol is what it is. The stories help both Bear and I remember which symbol is which. The article triangles should really be lighter blue than the adjective triangle, but I didn't have any light blue in my stash of foam.
After Bear has put the teddy in/on/under etc the bag, she pulls out the grammar symbols. I made these from foam sheets, just eyeballing it, no patterns. We use these in conjunction with the grammar symbol guide I printed from here to help us remember which symbol is for what part of speech. Bear is quite good at simple sentence analysis.
Bear is pretty good. We didn't really learn any parts of speech yet - only opportunistically when Anna asked about them.
ReplyDeleteIt started out quite conversationally while playing with the Farm:) After I explained about nouns, I just kind of kept going and adding the little slips of paper so she could make phrases (dog)....(brown dog).....(a brown dog).....(a brown dog jumped).....etc. So we went from noun to adjective to article to verb just by playing with strips of paper and the plastic animals. When she was comfortable with that then I introduced the symbols. (Just to see how she would respond and do...and since she did well, we kept going).
ReplyDeleteGreat post! We'll be starting this very soon. She just learned about different kinds of sentences and punctuations. Now she gets excited when she sees a punctuation in a book. I'm realizing that there's so many different ways to cover the same thing. Tomorrow I think we will play punctuation police where she spots all the missing punctuations and puts them in their right places.
ReplyDeleteVery cool!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this great post. I've been thinking about having the kids work with Montessori grammar symbols. This post was especially helpful. If you ever find that file by Josh Galarza, I'd love to read through it. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteLiesl
I just love this idea, Julie! I featured your bear posts and your photo in my Montessori-Inspired Teddy Bear Activities at http://livingmontessorinow.com/2012/07/09/montessori-monday-montessori-inspired-teddy-bear-activities/
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