Montessori Shelves and Using a Work Mat

Little J is sixteen months now.  L is back at school and we have managed to get back into some kind of routine.

Now that LJ and I have time in the morning to ourselves I have set up specific shelves for his "Montessori" works.  There is really not much difference between these activities and the ones in his cubicle shelves, however what is totally different is the process in which he does them.

I wanted to introduce a separate area so LJ could understand that anything taken from these shelves needs to be done in a certain way.

As you can see on the right of the first picture he now has a basket with work mats in it.  When first introducing a new work on these shelves I introduced the use of a work mat.  LJ gets the work mat and I help him roll it out.  He then goes to the shelves and selects a work.  It is important that he takes the whole basket or work and brings it over to the mat.  He then must take the work out of the basket to do it.  After he is finished he must put the work back into the basket and return it to the shelf before selecting another work. 

At this point I am not so interested in the actual works he is doing as the whole process.  What is important is that LJ knows he needs to use a work mat to do one of the works on his Montessori shelves.  It is also important to take the whole work over to the mat and of course to return it to the shelf.  I was quite surprised how quickly LJ took to the whole process.  Of course I am there to give him a gentle reminder to bring the whole basket or to help him remember to put the whole work away before getting another but in general he does really well.  I am also there to supervise if things start to go a bit "crazy"  I just sit back quietly and observe and only step in if I must say if he starts walking away from the mat with part of the work.

 

I generally keep four different works on the "Montessori shelves" and rotate one out every couple of days.  I've also found that once his Montessori work time is over (which is decided by himself) I remove the baskets from the shelves.  I've found that this helps in not having him continually go back to them and take pieces out later in the day.  If he would like to do more work and we both have some free time then he will get his work mat out and point to where I keep the baskets.

 The "Mystery" Bag.  Later on this is used to stimulate the stereognostic sense by having the child locate a known item in the bag without looking.  At the moment LJ is just using it as a bag of discovery although I think he will be soon ready to try the "mystery" aspect.

 Color matching.  I got these little wooden cups and bulbs from the craft store and painted them as shown.  The object is to match the colored bulb with the pot.  I decided to just paint the inside of the pots with the color to make it more of a challenge.  LJ mostly loves to manipulate these and sometimes matches the colors depending on what type of mood he is in!

 

We are blessed with living very close to a wonderful market that has goats on the roof, fresh fruits and veggies, yummy ice creams and best of all tons of super cool wooden toys.  I have to restrain myself every  time I go there to not buy up the store!

This adorable little fishing game came from the market.  LJ loves it and so does L.  This is quite a process to set up as he has to remove the "water" then add the fish before he can go fishing.  Once he has caught a fish he must put it in the red bucket.  LJ does this work several times throughout the morning.

 Lacing beads.  I wasn't sure if he was ready for this but low and behold he is!  It took him a little while to work out after several demonstrations but he is now able to make necklaces.  I taped a piece of straw onto the end of the shoelace with yellow tape to help LJ push it through the bead and also for him to easily locate the correct end.

 

I introduced a basket of wooden African animals along with smaller plastic animals for matching.  LJ knows the names of all of them so I figured matching wouldn't be much of a problem.  I made the mistake of saying can you find the mommy zebra.  Well that started off a frenzy of mommy and baby kissing as well as LJ kissing all of the mommy animals.  Seriously too cute!

 LJ loves to roll up his mat and put it away.  We sing a little roll, roll, roll song as he does it.

Tadpole Disaster!!!

We've been raising tadpoles for the last three and a half weeks. 

We got them when they were at this stage from a nearby pond with plans to release them once they turned into froglets.

It has been such a wonderful learning experience to see the tadpoles growing and going through the different stages.  L colored, cut out and glued this Life Cycle of a Frog.

I also made up some three part cards for her with real pictures.

 L couldn't wait until they got "gills"

Yesterday we had painters here to power wash the house and our deck before they paint our house next week.  Apparently they used bleach and left the almost empty bottle on our patio table where the tadpoles are.  I noticed the bottle for the first time this morning when L was playing out there

and had a bit of a freak out and took it away.

Well tonight while we were playing out there I went to check on the tadpoles.  The poor little things were all lying lifeless on the bottom of the bowl.  I called L over and after some questioning I got out of her the fact that yes she did indeed pour some bleach into the tadpole bowl.

Ahhh.  It really was an eye opener for me.  She seems so advanced in so many ways but this is such a reminder that she is only three! She doesn't know what bleach is and I just thank God that she gave it to the tadpoles instead of to herself!  The painters will be getting a few choice words on Monday when they come for sure.

I'm also super sad about our poor tadpoles.  I'd gotten pretty attached to them and was really looking forward to experiencing the rest of the stages with L.

Of course L took it all in stride and said "Well we'll have to get some more next spring".  Still too young to really understand.

RIP little tadpoles.

The Life of Bees

A few weeks ago I borrowed City of Bees from the library. This DVD peaked both my and L's interest and I decided to do some research and put together some activities.
I found a lot of great resources here and one of them was a template to make your own bee. I cut all of the pieces out of construction paper and used wax paper for the wings. I really helped L with her bee because I wanted the end product to be realistic for further use.

We talked about the different parts of a bee and counted how many wings, legs, eyes etc. they have. Did you know a bumble bee has five eyes! I used some hexagon pieces from our Settlers game to create a small piece of the hive for the bees to fly into and do their various work.

We of course also talked about how bees make honey and then had to sample some for our snack.

I saw this counting game on Chasing Cheerios a while ago and adapted it for bees. Each bee has it's own number and each time you roll the number the bee moves closer to her flower to get the nectar.

The other day L was playing in the back yard and came to the door with something in her hand to show me. She was so excited "Look Mommy a bee!!" I tried not to freak out and quickly realised it was no longer alive. Phew. Then I got excited myself and pulled out the magnifying glass and all of our bee materials. We had a blast examining a real bee and comparing it to our diagrams and pictures.

Some other things we've done are to talk about the different types of flowers bees like and watch them pollinate and get nectar from them. We also drew pictures using the diagram as a guide to know how many parts to put on them.

This has been a real learning experience for me as well as L. I realised how little I knew about bees! We are planning to do some more bee activities in the next little while before we move onto something else.

Here are some of the books we've been reading:

Bumble Bees by Cheryl Coughlan

World of Insects Bumblebees by Emily K. Green

Honey Bees by Deborah Heiligman

Montessori Monday

I am so happy to finally have my laptop back! Oh yes and my husband ; ) he's finally finished his training. So now I can post whenever I get the urge.
For Easter we got L an African safari book that has puzzle like pieces you can put in and out and also stand them up to put in an African plains scene. I decided to get L to pair them up with these African animal cards I found at a boot fair ages ago. L really enjoyed this but it was very easy for her. After she paired them up we sorted them into meat eaters and non-meat eaters.

We haven't done anything with color tablets for ages so when I found these old paint samples I'd brought from England I thought I'd see how she did with color grading. Amazingly this was really very easy for her and she did three different color grades in a few seconds. I used the uncut paint sample for a control card that she would turn over to check her work.

I also got these plastic shapes ages ago for sorting. They are supposed to be used to link together to make jewelry. L can now do this so we've been having fun making all sorts of things. I also took it as an opportunity to introduce patterns. I think L sort of gets it but she wasn't in the best frame of mind for it. I think next time I will take the rest of the basket away and just use a few pre-selected ones to make the patterns.

I saw this brilliant idea for counting on The Wonder Years and thought I would change it up a bit using our ladybugs and not putting dots on. Just in case it's not clear in the picture the numbers are written on the top of the stick and L has to pick one from the glass. She then places the correct number of ladybugs on the stick. She liked this one a lot and has brought it out several times.

What we've fit in

Well things seem to still be quite hectic here!! Trying to fit everything in has been difficult and I'm afraid I haven't had time for any "inventive" activities. I will be doing a post on how we've set up our new environment for L very soon to answer a question in a previous post.

Does anyone ever get a great idea for an activity and spend a lot of time preparing it just to have their kid ace it the first time they do it? This just happened to me. Before we left I made up some paper apples and butterflies to work on putting things in order of size. We've never done this before so I thought it would be a good time to introduce it. Ha ha! Apparently she just gets it! She did them all no problem first time and also brings out her new Russian dolls many times during the day. So now I'll have to think of another use for the cutouts.

L also has a great time washing things while taking a bath. Last night it was her animals but we've had tropical frogs and all sorts of insects in there as well! She scrubs, washes then drys them and puts them away. Montessori in the bath!

We've also been out collecting holly and greens for our wreath and reindeer box. The weather has been beautiful and crystal clear but COLD! We're not used to it.

And today we went to the Vancouver Aquarium. It was AWESOME!! This is just one pic but we got to see beluga whales above and below water, a dolphin show, otters, amazing jelly fish and tons of other stuff. We also got to see a 4D movie which was soooo cool. I thought L might be scared but she just sat on Daddy's lap the whole time holding her glasses mesmerized!

Land, Water and Air

While looking for a new puzzle for L I found an AMAZING sticker book. Over 1000 stickers of everything you could possibly imagine. When I saw it my eyes glazed over thinking of all of the classification activities we could do!

This is the first one we started with. Land, water and air (sky). I put the stickers onto cardboard and then cut them out. I painted this scene onto some cardboard and put it into a wooden box that we had. L loves this activity and since yesterday has brought it out four times. I'm not sure why but she always wants to put the wombats into the tree! We've settled on them living at the bottom of the tree!

Once she gets tired of this one I'll introduce the basics of mammals, birds, insects and reptiles!

Puzzles, puzzles all day long

I found these animal puzzles and also some construction vehicle puzzles at the boot fair for 50p! They are 3,4,5 and 6 pieces and L can't get enough of them. This is the first time that I have really seen a sensitive period so blatantly in action! She does them over and over again. I like these puzzles because she has to first sort them into piles and once she has done one she has to push it off of the mat to clear a space for the next one. They are not only teaching her about puzzles but also how to organise her work space.

I also made up this song for cleaning the puzzles up. Something along the lines of This is the way we.... but we would sing L.... is putting the elephant away, elephant away, elephant away, L.... is putting the elephant away into the box. I've also tried it in other areas like clearing her table and it seems to be transferable. Woohoo! Simple but it works a treat at the moment and I'm milking it for all it's worth while I can!

I also found some great African animal cards at the boot fair for 10p. They have very detailed descriptions on the back which we can use later on. After looking through them L matched her animals to the ones on the cards. There was a similar activity posted on The Wonder Years a little while ago.

Going on Safari

For Daddy's birthday we decided to go to a Wild Animal park close to our home. I really don't like zoos and animals in captivity but this one is the closest we could find to animals being able to live in their natural environment. It is set in 600 acres and even has an African Experience Safari where different animals roam freely.

Setting off. Now I did read on the website that the park was set in 600 acres but it obviously didn't register as we set off sans stroller. At the end of this path were about 5 flights of stairs down to the old manor house. Well we soon realised that it was going to be a huge trek. L the little trooper did a fantastic job and only had to be carried up the hills.

One of our favorite animals. We got a book about wild animals out from the library a week before we went so L knew all of the names of the animals and was so excited to spot them.

Trying to step on her shadow. She thought this was hilarious.

Out on the open plains. This was from the safari bus. It was so cool and as close as we'll be getting to Africa for a long time I think. We were exhausted by the end of the day but I think fun was had by all!

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 : )