What we've managed to fit in

With all of our energies put toward getting the house ready to sell poor L has been a bit neglected. Here are a few things we did manage to do.

Polishing her boots. Getting ready to go to the park and jump in the puddles. Practical life is one area she has been doing a lot in. She helped me to scrub the kitchen floor, dust and clean the walls.
A plastic fantastic sorting activity.

Cheerio towers (got the idea from here)

and making straw and pipe cleaner necklaces.

Edible activities and a Mommy at the end of her rope!

Here are some activities we did today. They both seemed to have a snack theme which L really enjoyed. The first was making a pasta and Cheerio necklace. I'm amazed she actually made this as she ate about 3 Cheerios to every one that she laced!

We also shelled peas. This was fun for both of us. I love fresh peas. I helped L open the pea pods and she took out the peas and put them in the bowl. This was a really good sorting activity.

Now this is not very Montessori but I have to share. L has refused to take a nap for quite a while now. The problem is by about 4 she is really tired (not to mention I need a break!). She turns from a charming little girl into a wild banshee (well it seems like it at the time anyway). I can only take so much before I loose my patience as I'm really tired as well. So for the last two days I did the "sneaky mommy" and hauled her into the car and got onto the motorway as fast as possible. Less than five minutes and she was fast asleep! Yippee I drove to the park put on Classic FM, rolled down windows and read my book for half an hour. That is all I need to be a good mommy again and L was back to her normal self. We played in the park when she woke up. I did this at 1pm by the way so it wouldn't effect her bedtime.

Does anyone else have any suggestions? or am I doomed to be driving up and down the motorway to protect my sanity??

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!