Charlotte's Web and other chapter books

L and I have both been enjoying reading chapter books at bedtime together.  We started off with Heidi which L loved and have now moved on to Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.  I remember loving this book(and movie I think)when I was a girl and couldn't wait to start reading it with L.

 L and I are vegetarians and I've always said that once L really knows what meat is, where it comes from and how the animals are kept she can make her own decision.  I think this book is a good introduction to how animals are used for meat(although I admit a bit unfair to have them be cute little characters that talk!).

To go along with the book we made shadow puppets to use in the shadow puppet theatre we made for the Carnival of the Animals.  We have Fern, Wilbur, Charlotte, Templeton and the goose who isn't shown in the pictures.

I'm over the moon that our new house is so bright that L can just use the natural light from our bay window for the shadows.

Here I think L is acting out the part where Templeton's rotten egg breaks and stinks out the whole barn!  It was hard to get a still shot as the characters were moving all around trying to run away from the stink!

Do you have any favorite chapter books you love to read to your children?

Streams and Vines board game

L loves to play games or do activities after dinner and before bed.  I've been wanting to do a variation on Snakes and Ladders for ages and after seeing one in the store for $19.00!! I was spurred on to finally create it.

Our version is called Streams and Vines( including one waterfall).  The little girls(cut out from a cute Christmas card)have to make their way home, sometimes getting a shortcut by climbing the vines and other times getting a setback by flowing down the stream or if they're really unlucky falling down the waterfall!

 I wanted to make up a game for L to practice her counting but also added the element of some cards for her to practice her reading as well.  The cards say things like "Get on a frog and hop back three spots" , " Get a ride on the bird to the nest" or "Move up 4 spots".

This game was so simple to make and the best part was it was totally free!!  I just painted a piece of cardboard, cut some paper up for the cards, used a frog, needle felted bird and die we already had and recycled the little girls from an old Christmas card.  L loves it and after the first couple of games has got the hang of it.

Gnome Board Game

L loves to read but is not that keen on reading books.  I came up with the idea of making a little playscape for her gnome children but make it in the format of a board game. 

How it works is each player picks a gnome and then takes turns picking a card and reading it.

The cards have directions for the gnomes such as "Take a nap in the cave" or "Get the fishing rod.  Catch a fish".

The winner is the first gnome to collect a fish, stone and flower although winning is not really the point of the game.  The little fish are needle felted with a small piece of paper clip needle felted inside that way the gnomes can  actually catch the fish with the tiny fishing rod which has a magnet glued to the end of the string.

They especially like to catch the fish while standing on the bridge.

All of the flowers except two are glued down along with the bridge and river but the other things are stored in a little draw string bag when not in use.  That way she can change up the board however she likes.

This game has been brilliant and we all love playing it.  At first I'd planned to keep the cards in order as we picked them but now that L knows what they say she just rifles through until she finds the one she wants her gnome to do.

As L's reading vocabulary expands I'll change the cards to keep her challenged.

L has been able to sound out cvc words for a while now but this past month she has completely exploded in her interest and ability to read and also to sound out words.

She is really interested in what letter sounds are in words and is constantly breaking up words to figure out the sounds.

This is the first word she spelled out after one of our walks.

Something that has been immensely helpful has been these word family game cards.  I saw this brilliant idea on The Snail's Trail using paint chips ages ago and bookmarked it for when we were ready.  I couldn't find the right kind of paint chips so I just used colorful paper. 

These totally helped L to hear and see how different words can change just by changing one letter.  After using these cards she is constantly thinking up different groups of words that rhyme.

 Usually after school when we are sitting down for lunch our conversation(lead by L)consists of sounding out different words and her friends names and figuring out who has L's in their names.  She is bored of sounding out cvc words and wants to do things like watermelon!  How do you tell a kid that we need to walk before we can run!!

I made up this activity for her where she picks an object out of the mystery bag and then she finds the letters to spell it.  She sometimes needs help putting them in the correct order as she likes to find the beginning and ending sounds first.

We also did an activity that I thought would be ages away where I wrote action words like "jump", "clap", "run" and "sit".  I would show them to L and she had to read them and then do the action.  She ripped them off no problem and loves them.

She is totally in a self led sensitive period for reading and sounding out words and I'm trying to keep up with her.  In a way it's difficult doing phonics because most of the words she tries to read in everyday life aren't phonetic!  Very frustrating for her and me.

I ordered the first series of the Bob Books and L really enjoys these. 

A warning to parents who teach their children the letter sounds at an early age.  They might just want to use them!!!

Fantastic Printable Materials

We've been trying out these printable materials from Montessori for Learning and L is really enjoying them.  The website is a fantastic resource.  Along with having a membership area it also has tons of great free printable materials. 

Here L is doing the singular/plural activity. 

After putting the pictures in their correct columns she decided to match all of the pictures saying "one ant, three ants"

We also enjoyed learning about the names of the fingers.  We talked about the different names and then placed them on the hand together.  She then did the activity with the control card.

To help with learning we sang a cute little song with actions.

(put hand up in a fist)

Little thumb, little thumb

Where are you?

(pop your thumb up and wiggle)

Here I am, here I am

How do you do?

(close hand into a fist again)

Index finger, index finger

Where are you?

(pop up index finger and wiggle)

Here I am, here I am

How do you do?

continue on for all fingers.

then finish with

(both hands in fists)

Fingers all, fingers all

Where are you?

(open both hands and wiggle fingers)

Here we are, here we are

How do you do?

L absolutely adored singing this song and after a few times she matched the labels to her own fingers.

Mystery words.  Sooo much fun.  You have to use a mirror to read these secret words. 

These are just a few of the many great activities we've been trying from Montessori for Learning.

Language, letters and beginning reading

L is most definitely in a sensitive period for language and letters. Since she pretty much had all her lower case letter sounds down I introduced the upper case. We found this foam puzzle at the dollar store and the upper case letters were actually mine when I was a kid(way to go mom!)

We started off playing a game where I find the upper case and she finds the lower case. She can do them by herself now and can't get enough. She brings it out all the time and it's starting to drive me bonkers!


We've been playing stage four of the eye spy game so I finally made up some last letter sound sorts. All of the pictures start with the same letter to make it less complicated.

We also tried writing some letters in salt which was a big hit. First we tried easy ones like "o", "i" and "u" which were a great success. L was so excited and wanted to try them all which was of course disastrous! We just haven't worked enough on tracing the sandpaper letters yet for her to have any clue where to start writing them. It was fun but we'll do a lot more tracing work before trying to write more letters.

I was reading through some old posts from The Adventures of Bear(fantastic blog) and saw her poor mans version of the spinny speller. L came over and looked at the screen. She said c-a-f. So I pointed to the last letter and asked her what it was and she said t. Then she said cat. WHAT!? Okay so as soon she'd gone to bed I made my own version.

Today we tried it starting with "at" I said "a" and "t" each separately and then blended them. Then she said "at". We tried the first word cat and she got it. Then tried the rest. She got them so I added the pictures which she matched.

We moved on to her sounding out the words on these cards and matching them to the pictures. No problem! She wanted to do more but I didn't have anything else prepared. She is just exploding in her understanding in this area and I can't seem to keep up. I suppose tonight I'll have to make another "spinny speller" and find some more pictures.

I know with the Montessori Method the children learn to write the words first which I want to try but I don't have a movable alphabet. Soon I'll introduce step five of the eye spy game and while I'm doing that try and figure out how to make up my own version of the movable alphabet.

I'm starting to get out of my depth here and can't wait until she starts Montessori school in September!

In the mean time...

I still don't have a camera and yes I am going through all of the stages of grief. Thanks for the commiserations and advice. I would LOVE to get the Cannon Powershot D10 but I don't think we can swing the budget that far.

So in the mean time I thought I would talk a bit about books. This is a question I've had for a while now and have been meaning to post about it.
As I understand it the Montessori Method encourages books for 0-6 to be based on reality. After reading Montessori from the Start I was left with the impression that all books introduced to this age group should be "reality" based.
Well this has not been the case in our house. Maybe because we came to the whole Montessori thing too late and had already been reading L fantasy books and most of them are gifts from relatives. I do try to only get factual books from the library but I'm telling you they are really few and far between for this age group!
I would be very interested to hear what sort of books other people read to their children and how they feel about fantasy and the Montessori approach. In my opinion I don't think L even at this age has a problem with distinguishing between the dancing dinosaurs in her book and the ones we saw at the museum this weekend but I could be wrong.

That being said these are our favorite library books at the moment.


The whole family loves this book. We love all of the sounds and the humor. After a few times reading it to L she could say the lines along with us.
Also Rainforest Animals by Paul Hess. The illustrations in this book are so vibrant and the poems are clever and catchy.
Some of our all time favs are the Jillian Jiggs and Hairy Maclary books.

I would really love to hear all of your opinions and what some of your favorite books are. L just can't get enough and we're always looking for a good read!

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!

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!