Recycling

Nature and Mother Earth are very important to us and we try to do our bit and tread softly.

Recycling is part of our daily routine.

Since we've been living in Canada L has been able to help with the daily recycling. 

When we were camping a few weeks ago when L finished her apple she asked where the compost was so she could put her core into it.

I decided it might be fun to make up an activity based on where we put certain things when we are finished with them.

I made up a container for compost, recycling and garbage and then drew some pictures of things that would go into each.

L had to decide which was the appropriate container for each item.

We then moved inside and she placed all of the items under their correct container.  This was a great talking point as she is also really interested in what things are made of at the moment.  She is constantly saying "is this made of glass? wood? metal? etc."

We also save all of our bottles and juice containers and once our box is full we take it to the bottle depot.  L helps with this and gets the money to put in her bank account to use for classes such as swimming or dance.

Some of what we've been up to

After taking a small blogging break I'm back and ready to post.  It helps that the weather hasn't been very good so we've been doing more indoor activities.

One rainy day I filled these glasses with water and tuned them to the first five notes of L's xylophone.  L is really big into do, re, me etc from The Sound of Music.  Once she experimented with playing the glasses we matched do on the xylophone with do on the glasses as well as the other notes.  We talked about higher and lower pitches and I played a few tunes on the glasses for her.

I bought these pony beads to do some math activities and L asked to sort them.  Talk about a never ending task!  She stuck with it for quite a while.

After covering living/non-living and plants and animals we've moved on to classifying birds, insects and reptiles.  We talk about the different characteristics of each group and then she sorts them.

L has also been helping out a lot around the house.  Especially in the garden.  These two pics are switched around but here she is helping Granny put some clippings in the compost.  I have to say that L officially knows more about gardening than I do now!

Stay tuned for some more indoor activities and my upcoming giveaway!

A bit of our week

I've decided to cop out on the whole "reading" the Montessori way (ie. learning to write first) and am just following L's lead. I'm taking the easy way out and hoping she'll get the right schooling when she goes to school in September. For now we're just doing fun sounding out games like this fishing for words game and lots of the eye spy game.

L catches a word and then matches it with one of the figures.

We've also been learning about living and non-living. This has lead to several funny conversations. Like when Daddy got home and I asked her if he was living or non-living and she said "Daddy's a carnivore!" hehe. She also woke me up the other morning by saying "Mommy an elephant eats food, drinks and has babies so it's living" Good morning to you too!

We then moved on to plants and animals. She totally gets the animal bit but had a harder time getting her head around the fact that plants can't move(on their own) after some good discussion and looking out in the back garden I'm pretty sure she's got it now. Too funny the things that come up when talking to a two and a half year old!

We've also been doing some more work with the blindfold and she's much more comfortable wearing it. Today we did some blind tasting and guessing what the food was. This was easy for her but when it came to my turn she always told me what she was going to put in my mouth. I still tried to act surprised. One day she's going to learn how to play a joke and tell me one thing but give me another!

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.

Montessori Monday

This is what we've been up to this last week. Not sure that everything is "Montessori" per say but I'll link up to Montessori Monday over at One Hook Wonder anyway. If you'd like to see what others are doing just press the button on the sidebar.

Matching mothers and babies. I found all of the images on the Internet, printed and laminated them. I used some that are a bit tricky like caterpillar and butterfly and I found a picture of the smallest panda cub!! This activity was easy for L but we'll keep doing it together so she can learn the different names of the babies.

More first sound sorts. I found these next two printables over at PreKinders. For this one I put all of the letters in a bowl. L picked one out and looked for the correct picture. There were too many here I think for her and she lost interest after about six. I've since cut the paper in half which works much better.

L knows almost all of her lower case sounds so I'm starting to introduce the upper case. We used these cards first of all to find little "h" and big "H". They are written on the cards so it is easy for L to recognise them. She then put a penny on the picture with the correct beginning sound. L enjoyed this activity and I'm going to add some more cards this week.

I saw this super cool felt flower activity on Making of a Montessori Mum but it was originally on Montessori Mama.

You just cut out different sized pieces of felt and cut a small hole in the middle. Wrap a pipecleaner around a pompom and let your child thread the felt on. I just used up a bunch of felt scraps so the flowers are an interesting combination of colors.

L got this pair of beginner chopsticks from her friend Aa girl and really enjoyed sorting this tri-colored pasta.

Fruit or Vegetable Conundrum

When I first bought the Amazing Sticker Book one of the activities I'd imagined doing with L was classifying fruits and vegetables. One night I got to work putting all of the stickers on cardboard backings and cutting them out. I thought I'll just check on a couple to see if they are actually classified as fruits or vegetables. WELL little did I know what I was getting myself into.

Scientifically speaking according to botanists a fruit is anything that has seeds. So this makes many of our well loved vegetables technically fruits!

“To really figure out if a tomato is a fruit or vegetable, you need to know what makes a fruit a fruit, and a vegetable a vegetable. The big question to ask is, DOES IT HAVE SEEDS?
If the answer is yes, then technically, you have a FRUIT. This, of course, makes your tomato a fruit. It also makes cucumbers, squash, green beans and walnuts all fruits as well. VEGETABLES such as, radishes, celery, carrots, and lettuce do NOT have seeds (that are part of what we eat) and so they are grouped as vegetables.”Read more: http://vegetablegardens.suite101.com/article.cfm/fruit_or_vegetable_#ixzz0SgDdoUWr

Of course in the culinary world the classifications are completely different. So I'm thinking where do I start. My daughter isn't even two! Do I really want her to go to school telling the teacher that a cucumber and pepper are actually fruits? No. I took the easy way out and decided we'd just look at and name them all and leave the classification to someone more qualified in these matters ; )

Silly mommy! When we got to the aubergine(eggplant) L asked "what is this?" so trying to be smart since we are moving to Canada I said it's an eggplant. L replies "oh, is it like an aubergine?". Hmm I think this goes into the ever growing outsmarted by a toddler category!!

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!

Ranting and Raving

OK first the rant.... Why oh why don't the ABC picture books out there use the phonetic sounds??? L is really into alphabet books at the moment and I can't find any that use strictly phonics. We have to fudge over the words like acorns, ice cream, giraffe. You get the point. It is so confusing. I did look at the Jolly Phonics book but I think there are way too many pictures on the page. If anyone has found any good phonic ABC books I would love to hear about them. I'm also trying to find a book where you can trace the letters.

That being said...now for my rave. I would just like to take a moment to rave about the latest book that I have finished reading. Montessori Read & Write A Parents' Guide to Literacy for Children by Lynne Lawrence. I'm sure many of you have read this book already but for those who haven't I would definitely recommend it.
There is a large section on learning about your child's development and how to incorporate the Montessori approach. She includes lots of step by step activities to prepare for reading and writing basically from birth. I loved the easy and straightforward way this book has been written and will be using lots of the activities with L. I originally borrowed this book from the library but it is such a good resource that I decided to buy it.

Here is one of the first activities we've done from the book. Classified cards. I got my camera and took a general picture of one of our rooms. Then took pictures of eight things in that room. I love technology! I was able to do everything on the computer and then print off the pictures, glue them to some card and voila. Personalised classified cards. Here I have done the bathroom and the garden. L can't get enough of these and I think it's because she recognises all of her "stuff". I also put checking colors on the back but as I thought might happen she just uses them to sort the colors! I think we'll leave the checking until she is a bit older.
Each room is kept in a Ziploc bag and all of the bags are stored together in a box. L chooses two rooms at a time to work with.

Here you can see she's put the objects under the rooms but she really likes to put them on the picture where they are supposed to be!