Art

Yesterday and today have been art days. L has been asking to paint so yesterday we tried a few things from some other posts I've seen. First of all we made toilet paper tube stamps (courtesy of 4 Crazy Kings) and dipped them in paint. Then we moved on to shaving cream thanks to Making of a Montessori Mum. After the initial dislike of getting her hands dirty (I have a strange kid who doesn't like mess or being dirty except at meal times!) she was off.

Then she decided to use the stamps in the shaving cream. I know where she gets this aversion to being dirty as all of this time Daddy was standing in the side lines twitching. He hates when she does painting and can't wait to wash her!

Daddy's and my sister's birthdays are both coming up in July so I decided to try these silhouette paintings to give them as gifts. You can find out more on how to do them here. Well I was all gung ho at my local Crafts mega store when I asked for contact paper. The girl looked at me like I'd grown a third eye or something. She had everyone in the store looking and there was nothing. So as I had my heart set on doing it anyway I had to come up with an alternative. In the end I cut the silhouette out of cardboard and then taped it with painters tape onto the canvas. L and I painted the canvas, although she was very attracted to painting the cardboard. When I took it off it was a disaster as I'd figured it might be so I then took the negative part and painted inside with a single color. I was then able to do some small touch ups. I think in the end I'm happy with the results. I wouldn't recommend doing it this way though unless you have a lot of time on your hands and no other alternative.

Perseverence and what we've been up to...

Towards the end of L's 19th month we tried a couple of new things. The first one was of course potty training. I'm happy to report that it has gone extremely well and I would say that she is fully "trained". She will either go to the bathroom when she needs to or if we're out she will tell me "I have to go pee". Can't ask for more than that. I'm still helping her pull her pants down but we're working on her doing it on her own. At the moment I'm just more anxious for the pee to go into the potty!
The other thing was having L pour her own water and drink out of a glass. It was not that she wasn't capable of doing these things before it was that she would mess about with the water and drive me nuts. Well we've made a lot of progress on this and she now very rarely bothers with the water other than to drink or pour it into her glass. We do still get the occasional fork or spoon in there though but I just take it away.

Some other things we've been up to are:

Locks and keys. L loves to try and open my car door so I bought her this little lock. It's a bit hard so I also bought her a bike lock that was on sale. With this one I've just tied them both to a string and threaded it through a lid so nothing gets lost.

We love the mystery bag!

There was a post on The Wonder Years a while back about scooping ducks out of a bowl of water. I bought these ping pong balls for L to try but she was too smart and took the easy way out and just picked them up with her hand and put them in the scoop! So I tried this activity instead and she seemed to grasp what I wanted her to do. We now do the scooping in the bath tub which is much more challenging and fun.

Yesterday I decided to put these geometric shapes into a bag and get L to take them out and match them. She already knows the cube and cylinder(which she calls a sillylid) from playing with the blocks. I introduced the ping pong balls as spheres which she didn't like because obviously they're really balls mom! and I started calling the triangles triangle prisms and then felt silly so we're just calling them triangles for now. Anyway she matched them no problem so I then took a turn and pulled out a cylinder and asked if she could find one. She was able to find it and the sphere no problem and didn't have too much problem finding the others either so we'll keep trying it this way from now on.

Making a rainbow and treasure bottle

The last few days have been really fun because we've had G.A.S. (aka Great Auntie S) staying with us. We did lots of projects and even went to a castle!
A few days ago I was perusing some blogs and found this fantastic idea on Unplug Your Kids.
Coloring rice!!! Love it, love it, love it! It was so easy and all three generations had a great time making it. I won't write out the instructions as I've posted a link if any one wants to try this.

We decided to make a rainbow. First we put the food coloring in and shook up the bags. I put tape across the tops just in case. It was also really cool to do the secondary colors and see how the two colors blended to make a new one.

Once we had all the colors for our rainbow L layered them according to one of our favorite songs I Can Sing a Rainbow.

Here she is singing and pointing out the colors. (anyone who is really observant will notice we got two of the colors mixed up!)

We also made the "treasure bottle" from Unplug Your Kids. I took a picture of all of the objects so L can see what she has to find. I have to say this was a really fun project for me as well and I can imagine I will be trying to find all of the objects after L has gone to bed! : )

Phonics Box

L has always been really interested in books and knows all of her books by title. We get three new library books every couple weeks she quickly learns their titles as well. I thought I would see how she responded to learning the phonics sounds. About three months ago I started making the sandpaper letters ( I know I have no life!). With each letter sound I also made three picture cards to go with it.
I introduced these to L at around 17 months and she loved them. Once we got going she picked them up quite easily. I keep them all in a small box we call the "phonics box". I don't keep them out but often ask her if she'd like to do them or she will ask for them.
I've sort of combined the Montessori Method with Jolly Phonics where the sounds are introduced in seven different groups. At the moment we are on the third group.

Once she'd learned the first group I introduced the magnetic letters as well. She loves to say them and match them to the sandpaper letters. As these are home made out of paper we didn't start tracing them right away because she constantly had her hands in her mouth. We've only recently started tracing them so we have a bit of catching up to do there.

After she'd learned the first two groups I introduced some words. I put the card over the word and she sounds out each letter. This takes a lot of concentration for L and we only do it in very short stints. We also match the magnetic letters with the word and picture. We've only just started doing this one and I'm taking it very slowly at L's pace. We also play the eye spy game which she is just cottoning on to!

I'm not sure when she'll start reading but I'm sure after a while everything will just click. She often points out the phonics she sees in books, and when we're out and about. I wish I could get some small figures for her to spell instead of just pictures but I can't seem to find any.

I would love to hear what anyone else has done with their children when introducing reading!

Fun on the Farm

For the last little while, well long while actually daddy has been having to do extra work on what are supposed to be his days off. So we have been seriously lacking in fun family outings. Well that finally changed last weekend when we went to the beach and this weekend we went to the Rare Breeds Centre. It is a fantastic place where children can get up close to the animals. Not only are there your typical farm animals but there are also rare birds, a butterfly tunnel, alpacas and even chipmunks! As well as the farm bit there are acres of woodlands and cool playgrounds. We always have a good time and with the beautiful weather today was no exception.

Strangely L had no fear of any of the animals except this sleeping piglet. We had to coax her to pet it.
Guinea pigs with lots of cute little babies.



Feeding the rabbit some lettuce.


Feeding the goat some hay. Funnily enough he wasn't interested : )

Color Matching

L loves her "lacing chopsticks" so much but she's really mastered putting them on and taking them off and also putting all one color on so I was looking for an extension activity. I spent some time with my new best friend (cardboard that is) and came up with this. I saw something similar on an old post from Chasing Cheerios.

The tubes are made of pasta and just painted and the posts are BBQ squewers. She was so excited to see it on her shelf and wanted to do it right away. I showed her how to try and match the colors. It's quite a difficult concept to understand that when you put one on it goes down to the bottom so you have to always work from the bottom up. She can do it if I point to the colors as she puts them on. I think I was a bit over zealous and should have started with blocks of color. I may make a couple sheets that can go on top of that one with different patterns.

We also started and extension of the color tablets. She can easily match all of the colors together in box 2 so we've moved on to matching hues. This is obviously much harder but I was surprised that some colors were easy for her while others were very difficult.

A new Montessori school has recently opened in the village we plan to move to in Canada and we are hoping L will be able to attend once we get there. I can't wait for her to be able to use real Montessori materials!

Playing blocks with daddy. This is very entertaining for me to watch because my husband really gets into it and loves to build intricate cities while L loves to knock them down!

A Great Day!

Today was one of those days which my friend over at Aayla Do! Montessori describes as a Happy Happy day. One of those days when everything falls into place and your kid is mostly agreeable. I think it helped that L didn't get up until 8:30 this morning (yippee!!) and the weather is great here.
We started off with dusting L's Montessori shelves. One of the things on my 20 month to do list. We started by taking all the activities off the shelf and then doing a good dust. We then moved on to the rest of the house until she lost interest.
The potty training is also going well. Today we went swimming in the outdoor pool at our Leisure Centre. It was fantastic until I asked L if she had to go pee. The answer was yes so we made a quick dash to the change room where I had to get the potty out of the locker then take off her armbands and then her bathing suit!! All the while thinking she wasn't going to make it. Finally we got into the bathroom and onto the potty and it was a false alarm!! Ahhh. Oh well at least it has taught me to put her in her two piece bathing suit from now on.

In the afternoon we both had a lot of energy (probably because she was being so agreeable) so we practiced jumping over the line. L had great fun with that as she's really into jumping at the moment. We also tried to walk the line which was really thin.

I then put some music on and she had another session of "rhythmic gymnastics" or ribbon dancing. This is so much fun and I highly recommend it!