On the shelves-19 months

 I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season.  It was very busy at our house with lots of family visiting and fun was had by all.  

I did manage to get a few works on the shelves for LJ in December.

Melissa and Doug pattern blocks. 

 I got these off of the used children's items site I belong to for a very reasonable price.  They come in a wooden box with several different wooden frames.  I just take out one at a time which has pictures on both sides.  I put it along with the shapes it needs into a basket for LJ to do.  

 Mystery Bag

Although we have been using the mystery bag for exploration for a while now we have only just started using it for stereognostic recognition.  I put an assortment of known objects into  the bag.  LJ pulls them out and names them.  He then puts them back into the bag and I ask him if he can find a certain one without looking.  He enjoys playing this game and is usually successful.

Putting Cheerios into a pill container.  

I bought a seven day pill sorter for my pills and vitamins but before I put it to use I gave it to LJ to sort Cheerios into.  He had great fun opening the sections to get the Cheerios in and out.

We even managed some Christmas themed activities.

Here is a Christmas mystery stocking with a tiny snowman, red ribbon, needle felted Christmas tree and several candy canes.  

Pushing colored pompoms through the correct hole and then retrieving them from inside the shoe box.  LJ was pretty random on when he chose to match the colors.

We did several Christmas crafts together but this one worked the best with both children.  Simply gluing tiny pompoms onto a pine cone to make Christmas trees.

 They both enjoyed this activity and they turned out nicely!

18 months- On the shelves

Okay I have to admit I've been totally slacking the last about 5 weeks.  We got out of our great routine and I kind of lost enthusiasm on making up activities.  In fairness though I have been working on another exciting project which I will blog more about after Christmas.

Poor LJ he actually asks me for work and says "roll,roll, roll".  Then I feel all guilty because he is desperate to do things.

These are some of the things he has been doing.

 

Matching.

This is great for vocabulary and matching.  I hold all the cards in my hand and give him one at a time.  He says what it is and then (hopefully) places it on the table.  Once all the cards are laid out I hand him the matching one which he has to find.  This is very easy for him now.  They are kept in a little wooden box and he loves to take them out and put them back in as well.

 

Simply posting little hearts through a slot.  Always fun.

 

Color tablet box one.  I made these out of paint samples using the three primary colors to start.  Once again the box is a big hit!  It's funny when I did this activity with L years ago she was so gentle with the cards.  LJs cards are all bent and twisted : )  I present a color and name it and then give it to LJ to place on the mat and say the name.  Once they are down I give him the other one to match.

 Sorting colored beads.  Once again only using the primary colors. 

 I filled this glass money jar with water and put a shot glass at the bottom.  Together we took turns putting coins into the slot and watching them sink to the bottom.  I also enjoyed trying to get them into the shot glass, however I don't think LJ even realised it was in there. 

 

 Thanks to Itty Bitty Love inspiration I sucked it up and got out the lentils to scoop and funnel.  I have to say I was way more enthusiastic about this one than LJ was.  Maybe we'll try it again in a month or so.

 

...and one of my all time favourite works.  First drop fluffy pipe cleaners into a maple syrup bottle.

 

 Then try to fish them out.  Very carefully!

 Oooh the concentration!!!

 

LJ just can't get enough of doing his work and I am the only one that is holding him back at this point.  In the new year I am going to try to get back into that good routine we had going in the fall.

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.

It's summer and I for one am trying to take a break from formal Montessori activities.  L has other ideas though.  I have to say I'm happy, especially in the mornings she will go and pick something now that she hasn't picked in ages and want to do it.

The other day she picked the mystery bag.  After doing it the usual way I made up an extension where I got two of every object and put one of each in the bag.  She would feel one object and then try and find it's match in the bag.  She really enjoyed this and found it quite easy.

We did this wonderful activity that we did last year again but this time I mixed up the colors and L painted each compartment.  She then went round the garden and found things that matched.

After doing our instrument activities and learning about Peter and the Wolf L made her own instrument.  A rain maker.  We got an old paper towel tube and taped aluminum foil to one end.  Then L poured in some rice and we sealed up the other end with foil as well.

We made paper mache out of water and flour and L tore up the newspaper.

Once it was dry L painted it and glued on lots of sequins.  Here she's using it outside since happily this is the only sound of rain we've heard in a while!

Animal Sounds and a few other bits

I haven't been able to do much lately but was able to set this activity up mostly from the couch. It's my own version of animal sounds. So simple to make and free! I found this Youtube video of animal sounds, found pictures of all of the animals and printed them out on a piece of paper. L covers the animal who makes the sound with a penny. It was a great hit and we did it about six times today.

L started wanting to pull the golf tees out of her ladybug activity so I changed it for this one where she presses the colored toothpick into the dots of the correct colored shape.

I saw this super cute counting activity on The Adventures of Bear and just had to make one up for L. Not surprisingly she was more interested in having the polar bear eat the fish than the counting.

And lastly L got this totally cool map for Christmas with animals, people and place names to Velcro on to it. So much fun and will be a challenge for many years to come!

Nature's Rainbow

Today L and I went out for a long walk at our favorite park. It was a beautiful day but I can already feel the air changing from summer to fall. It seems like the summer has just flown by (at least the weather part!). Life sure changes when you have a young child. We were up and at the park by 9am on a Sunday morning!
I have been excited to try out this idea I saw on a number of blogs at the beginning of the summer but have been waiting until L was a bit older. Today was the day. So simple yet so cool!

I painted on the colors ahead of time. We'd been to this park recently so I knew which colors we would be sure to find. At first I had to point things out to L but she soon got the hang of it.

I think I enjoyed this activity even more than L and I can see us doing it again and again. Once she's older it would be great to just find all different hues of green or all fall colors. I'm going to have to get some more paint as I only have white and the primary colors and I don't think my mixing skills extend that far!

Silly mommy!

I decided to retire the chopsticks for a while and use the lacing beads for color matching. L is at the stage where she doesn't like change and will do the color matching but still asks where the chopsticks are all of the time so I brought them back. I was originally hoping she would match the patterns on the cards with the lacing chopsticks but we'll have to work on this activity a lot more before that will happen.

I also got this idea of spooning grapes into an ice cube tray from Leptir. L had no problem spooning the grapes in although she doesn't really understand why she can't just use her hand which is so much easier! But during the whole activity she was troubled, asking me where the ice was. Ice cube trays are supposed to have ice! Duh. So luckily I'd saved the ice and we switched grapes for ice.

She was much happier, although the activity quickly dissolved (literally) into a lot of sucking and licking. I just left her to it and went and did the dishes. She had a great time.

After reading Making of a Montessori Mum's post on circle time a while ago I got all inspired and decided to try having one with L. Well after diner one night it was just the two of us with lots of time before bed so I though yes I'll have an impromptu circle time. I got L all excited about the idea and put some instruments in a basket. We got the floor mat out and sat down and I began singing a song. Well after I'd finished and was all proud of myself L asked, "Mommy where's the circle?" Once again Duh! So I quickly grabbed bear and doll and added them to the circle. We passed them out some instruments and I did the pleases and thank yous for them. We sang another song together using the instruments and then L took one of the maracas from bear looking at me like, well he's not using it is he! We did a few more songs and then finished. L asked me once again where the circle was so I tried to draw one around us with my finger to show her. I realised it looked a lot more like a square.

So in conclusion (having been outsmarted by a 20 month old again) I'm either going to leave circle time for a bit or call it something else!

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.

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!

Cardboard is my new best friend...

Sometimes I think I should rename this blog "Cheap and Cheerful". As anyone who has read my posts will have realised I don't have any budget at all for Montessori activities. Therefore I have to try and be creative with the materials we have and we seem to have a lot of cardboard! I just came up with this little ditty when I saw a package of straws on sale at the supermarket. Just an old shoe box with small holes punched in the top. She has to match the color and also try to get the straw into the small hole. I thought this would be challenging for her but the first time she put them all in, with the correct colors no problem. Then she started exploring with the straws a bit (they're the bendy ones) and put them in bendy side down. She is also learning that she has to put one hand on the lid in order to take the straws out with the other and then take off the lid to store the staws inside.

I also found this excellent shape and colors game at the boot fair today for 50p. Bargain. L doesn't have much trouble with it but she loves it. It also comes with two dice that have the colors and the shapes on them which we'll try out a bit later.