Fun!

Look who was featured on The Montessori Goldmine!! (Thanks Jo! )

Monday Round up!

Wednesday's Websites The Etsy Edition

Science Kit Love that this kit comes in a cute bag and seems to contain any necessary supplies!
Craft Kits Perfect for the Mama who is just not crafty! All supplies included.
Felt Story Sets Love these super cute sets.
Play to Learn -Felt clocks, letters etc...
Beautiful wood puzzles etc... Wow! I love the leaf shape one!
Montessori phonics activities etc... Really great jewelry too!

edited to add: Card Table houses etc... I LOVE THESE!

Space

Solar System project
Outer Space and Constellation Activities
Starry Night ideas
Solar System Activities including cool book
Montessori Astronomy Newsletter
Space Math Ideas
Fold and Snip Stars
Constellation Painting
Montessori Astronomy Lessons
Moon Phases Memory

If you Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em!

Just over 2 months left of school for Josh! It is hard to believe how fast it went, how smooth/easy it was for him, and how hard it was for me!

It has taken all these months but I think I have FINALLY figured out a better rhythm for meeting Josh's academic needs. Initially, I thought we would just do school in the morning at home since he was attending PM young 5's. But apparently, we are too lazy to actually get much done that way. I also did not really anticipate that he would have so much homework and extra little things to do.

Another part of this year that was unanticipated was that the curriculum was really MUCH better than I could have even hoped it would be.

So what has worked? Instead of just trying to do the subjects etc... we planned, I actually was able to just add to what he was already learning. Seems obvious, right? But I honestly was not expecting to have enough substance to work with.

When I read the themes they would cover before school began I totally rolled my eyes and laughed because we had pretty much already covered all of it. And of course when I discovered she was using Core Knowledge's Preschool edition I was just reaffirmed. We did that entire book in about 3 weeks over the summer. (By the way, I <3 Core Knowledge!)

But Josh's teacher is amazing and is super into science and challenging all of the students.

For example, right now they are studying oceans. She has taught them...

• Vertebrate vs Invertebrate (plus a bit with Kingdoms within)
• The 5 fins on a fish.
• Who lives where in the ocean and why.
• and much, much more!

So I have just added bits and pieces to it. I was able to dig out the fish parts puzzle so Josh could trace and label the fins. We put together a cool coral reef puzzle and pulled out the seashell cards. It is really allowing me to incorporate the Montessori activities that I want for Josh in a way that is natural and really comfortable for both of us.

Montessori Monday

Between playing with new Christmas toys...

Practical Life
Baking Bread
Easy Embroidering


Tray ideas
Popsicle stick Snowflake
beads/straws Stars
Free explore with Fraction circles

Another Wednesday Website

Free lifecycle Pumpkin Sequencing Cards

HT: My Montessori Journey

Wednesday's Website

Check out these FREE Geology Rock cards! They are really nice with great pictures and information.

Afterschooling

...or in our case beforeschooling, since Josh attends PM young 5's. School is going great for him. He is enjoying it, LOVES his teacher and is actually learning quite a bit! He knows more about frogs then anyone would ever want to know! However, we still feel the need to enrich his learning with more. He is way ahead of his class in both math and reading. They are currently learning to count to 20. He could do that at 3 years old. So here is what we are doing...

Science- (as previously posted!) We have chosen several areas to study and are doing one a month! (September Biology plans, October Physical Science plans)

Geography- Landforms and the Continents using Continent Boxes, Continent books, and any other resources I dig up!

History- Story of the World We are enjoying this but I am having a hard time preparing ahead. I just need to sit down and get things ready for the month in a basket or something so I can just grab!

Music- To our dismay, due to scheduling, Josh does not attend Music at school this year! Therefore, I ordered Story of the Orchestra : Listen While You Learn About the Instruments, the Music and the Composers Who Wrote the Music! and am really excited to get started. We plan to begin tomorrow. (Just got it Friday!)

Practical Life- Remember these? I plan to start back up working on Josh's cookbook. Today was my b-day so I am thinking of having him help make a cake tomorrow (good excuse, right?). We also want to continue working on skills such as...

• tying
• cutting with scissors
• cutting with knife
• pouring

Math- Our main focus right now is on addition and heading toward subtraction. On our shelf you would find...

• Addition Strip Board (info)
• Addition Snake game (info)
• Hundreds board (video)
• Other manipulatives such as counters, dice, etc...

Language- This is the easiest and most natural! We have a reading night planned for Tuesday where we all pile into my bed and read to each other until bedtime. However, he reads to us or we read to him every night before bed normally. So I am not really planning anything extra...yet!

Art- Want to work on a few drawing skills and of course we will do seasonal crafts. We are happy with his school's art program so just having fun here for now!

Really though, this seems like a lot. But we have the entire school year and all summer to accomplish these things. Some weeks we do a ton and some weeks (like last week!) we get NOTHING done. Either way, we are not stressing. Our intention is to have school for an hour 4 days a week before lunch. ...but sometimes...the Lego's just need more attention than the dining room table...ya know?

My 5 Tips for A New Montessori Mom!

Jo recently left me a quick request,
I have recently been asked by a new-to-Montessori mom of a toddler, where to start? She is overwhelmed by the amount of equipment and information available...as you are a Montessori mother I would love it if you could share your top tips too.

Here are my top 5...

1. Focus on Practical Life! Little ones need lots of PL activities. The good part of that is PL activities are the easiest to make yourself...so, cheap and easy! Some great ideas for these activities can be found here!
2. The Child is likely to find a favorite activity and do it over and over and over. That is OKAY and actually wonderful. This type of behavior helps little ones focus and become peaceful. (My Josh made bead necklaces everyday for months, he did eventually pick other activities...I worried he never would!)
3. You, and your child will be okay if you do not have every activity available in a traditional Montessori environment. They will still learn all they need to know. Do what you can and make do when you can not! (We never did get Josh to do anything with the beads or the base 10 blocks for that matter...but he still learned to add at age 4!)
4. FOLLOW THE CHILD! Even if you planned to present say uh farms, if he wants to learn about bugs...Go with it! He will learn more if he is interested and your stuff will wait.
5. Finally, find support. Even if it is through an online community, you need to have someone to bounce ideas off of and vent to. I am so very grateful to all the moms who I have met through my blog and through reading theirs. Leave comments, ask questions. We all really want to help each other and a lot of these women have such amazing knowledge to share!

Here are a couple entries I wrote when planning to work with a toddler using Montessori:
Ideas
More ideas

Check out Jennifer's Blog
http://spiralmontessorimama.blogspot.com/
She teaches in a Toddler classroom and is an AMAZING Monte mom herself!

Good luck and feel free to always ask anything!

Free Resources

Animal Classification cards! For FREE! at Currclick from Teacher Bookbag.
Musical Instrument cards! For Free! at Currclick from Teacher Bookbag.

Yipppeee!

Wednesday's Websites

• Continent Map Demo
• Addition Snake game Directions! ~ I need to read through this everyday until I can actually remember it. Me and math are not friends!
• Fine motor tree craft ~ Josh would have LOVED this a year or so ago... may still!
• Recipe for Homemade NUTTERBUTTERS!!!! ~ ooooooh!
• Solar System book
• Paper plate stegosaurus
• Bacon Bowls ~ hmmm, sounds fun!

September = Biology

Here is what I am thinking for Biology!

BookList

The Skeleton Inside You (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)
Germs Make Me Sick! (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2) (Reading Rainbow book)
The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body
Me and My Amazing Body
The Way We Work
What Happens to a Hamburger? (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)
Why Do We Laugh? (Why Books)
Our Body (Child's First Library of Learning)
I Know Why I Brush My Teeth (Sam's Science)
Your Skin and Mine: Revised Edition (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)
My Five Senses (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1)

Other resources

Human Body Funstation
Beleduc Your Body - Boy 5-Layer Puzzle (Josh LOVES this...SOOOO worth the $$$)
Skeleton Floor Puzzle (much nicer than ours but that price is amazing!)
Talicor Somebody Board Game (LOVING this right now!)

Human Anatomy


Human organs coloring page

Human skeleton coloring page

Dr Pbody

Human Body - Power point of the body

3 Part cards

• simple but beautiful
• more body parts

Self Care

Dental Care ideas


The 5 Senses

neat intro for readers!

5 senses body cube game!

http://www.littlegiraffes.com/fivesenses.html

• Touch -mystery bag
• Hearing - Sound cylinders
• Smell - Spice jars matching
• Taste - compare sweet/sour/bitter/salty
• Sight - Magnifying glass activity

Simple reader!

Trace and color- fine motor practice.

Lapbook ideas

Science journal ideas

• Popcorn Experiment
• Play-doh experiment

Montessori Monday

Our Practical Life recently has mostly consisted of chores around the house. Josh gets an allowance for extra work he does above and beyond the things we consider his normal responsibilities.

So, for example he does NOT get paid for...

• Cleaning his room
• Picking up his toys
• Putting away his clothes
• Clearing his dishes

The chores he does get an allowance for ($.25 per)...

• Putting the recycling in the proper bins in the garage
• Picking up sticks in the yard
• Emptying the Soda can recycling bin into a bag(MI gets $.10 refund)
• Bringing the upstairs garbage cans downstairs
• Anything extra helpful...e.g. this week he helped with clearing stuff from the dining room before we pulled up the old carpet.
• Helping to feed the cats

He is currently saving his money for a batmobile we found at Target on clearance. We bought it then and he is paying us as we go. Sort of a rent to own deal. He gets to play with it for and hour every time he gives us $.25, until he gives us enough to total the $10. price.

So, how do you do allowance and chores?

Montessori Monday

Calendar Activity Set

I presented this work last week to Josh. He loved it and it was a nice follow up to our days of the week cards we used during our butterfly study (from The Very Hungry Butterfly by Eric Carle).

I laminated the whole set and gave him a bit of sticky tac to use to put the Calendar together. I just handed him my calendar (for a control) to use to find out where to start and what Holidays to add and he took off...doing it several times for different months.

Wednesday's Website

Newer Montessori blog that concentrates on more of the informational theory!http://educationinfoss.blogspot.com/

But if you have an interest in Montessori this is definitely one to check out!

Wednesday's Website

Shu-Chen Jenny Yen's On-Line Montessori Teacher Albums for 3-to-6 year old children

This is an invaluable Album I have used for years! I am re posting this link because it has been moved to a new web address!

If you have not checked it out...do so!

Shannon

Wednesday's Website

Many amazing Montessori ideas...great for a bit of inspiration! http://www.absorbentminds.co.uk/acatalog/ideasbank.html

Handwriting

You probably know that we use Handwriting Without Tears. I have been a BIG fan for years! Well, to be honest, it has not worked out for us...

That is, until now!

Josh has issues with anything sticky, dirty, wet...well you get the picture! The whole Wet, Dry, Try lesson was a big mistake to use with him. And he immediately was frustrated and disliked the whole thing. And, unfortunately, I was too persistent since I knew it was such a good program. Well, eventually, I backed off and put everything but the wooden pieces away. These I left on our writing shelf, but still, he ignored them.

Finally, this week, it occured to me to start over but instead of using the Wet, Dry, Try, I grabbed the sand tray (which he loves???) and used that instead. So our Handwriting time looked like this...

• Build letter with wooden pieces (talking about lines and curves as we go).



• I write the letter in the sand tray then he writes the letter in the sand tray.



• Finally he writes the letter on the wipe board. (could use paper but he likes the Yoda Wipe board!)
  

This worked really well and we did a-f! (Hmmm, but Shannon those are lowercase letters and HWT does not have lowercase???) Check here ~ Lowercase wooden pieces and letter cards! This guy makes these in a warehouse here in town! He also has a teacher store with some cool finds!

So anyway, I am thrilled and he was happy to be so successful writing the letters correctly.

*******Here is a picture of the lowercase wooden pieces...being used to make a treehouse...well, you know....

Wednesday's Website

Newish Montessori website....FILLED with everything Montessori. That includes Albums and videos etc...

http://www.wikisori.org/index.php/Main_Page

Landforms

I have been intending to make the landform work for Josh for well over a year now. I even bought the plasticine and store brand containers. Well finally this week I did it. I really like how it turned out. It was a bit more difficult than I expected...sheesh is that clay hard! But well worth the effort.




In the above picture you can see how a peninsula is just the cutout portion of a gulf.

All you need is...

• 10 containers


• Plascticine (but for a temporary set playdoh would work!)


• Knife to cut out the shapes


• cards like these
  
  montessorimaterials.org/Geography/LandFormCards.pdf
  
  http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com/Land-Water-Forms-Nomenclature--Photos_p_263.html $
  

I just divided the clay into 5 equal amounts and smashed them into 5 containers. Flattened it and used the cards to give me an idea of how to cut. I took out the unnecessary clay area carefully and put it into another container. (The landforms are all opposites like a lake is the opposite of an island. So you can use the clay you remove from the lake to be the island landform.)

I plan to present these soon having Josh pour a bit of water into each to show the actual landform. I also printed off cards https://edutccom.ipower.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=93 that show a more photographical picture of a landform. We will add small animals and fish to this work to further extend his understanding.

Landform Lesson!