Catching up-22 and 23 months

I openly admit that over the last couple of months I've totally been neglecting taking pictures of my children.  Yup I have been so busy taking a million and one pictures of my needle felting creations that I have forgotten all about my children.  Well almost.

Here are a couple pics of things LJ has been up to.

Playing with his Very Hungry Caterpillar story stones.  LJ loves to tell bits of the story with the stones and the one with all the food on he calls Saturday.  Too cute.

Table setting.  This is a favourite.  It's hard to see but I traced all of the items in the place setting with a black sharpie so LJ know where to put them.  

He then gets to take out his leek and pretend to eat it.  Too much fun!

Land and water.  I simply cut land and water shapes out of felt and put assorted animals in a box for LJ to sort.  He enjoys this but knows them too well.  He is such a joker that he loves to put the wrong animals in the water on purpose.

Of course decorating Easter eggs.  He was so focussed on his work!

Not a lot documented.  We've been playing with a lot of new "toys".  I was lucky enough to do a toy swap with Sweetpea's mom.  She has some really cool things.  I will try and take some pictures of them for an upcoming post.

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.

Little J 15 months activities

Phew finally midway through September and I am just now able to catch my breath!  Where did the end of the summer go?  It seems like August just started and the next thing you know L is in school and the leaves are changing!

Here is a catch up post on what Little J was up to in August at 15 months.

 

Scrubbing apples.  We have a wonderful apple tree in our yard.  Both L and Little J enjoyed eating the apples from the ground as well as helping to make blackberry and apple sauce.  This picture looks so civilised but it quickly turned into chaos as Little J decided it would be way more fun to tip out all of the water and roll the apples off the side of the deck!

 Painting al fresco.

 

On the shelves.  We didn't really have any strict "works" over the summer.  I found it way too hard with L around as she always wants to interfere with what ever Little J is doing. 

From the top left we have:

The shoe basket.  LJ is still obsessed with shoes and dressing himself.  We also have worked on sorting the shoes into pairs.

Stacking boxes, shape sorter and then the ever popular open and shut basket.  I keep rotating different containers in this basket.

Bottom left is a emergency vehicle puzzle with little knobs to develop the pincer grip.  An etch-a sketch type drawing board which we had when L was little.  It is great fun to draw and then push the lever across to erase all of your work! 

Melissa and Doug tool box.  Hammering is the number one favourite at the moment.  Little tow truck with wooden sorting shapes.  The tow truck has a magnet on it to attach the shapes to.  This is from Ikea.

 

These are just a few of the things that Little J got up to this summer.  What is not shown is LJ's love of climbing.  He will climb anything and everything.  The number of times I've been out of the room for two seconds and when I come back he is actually on the kitchen table searching for scraps!!  He certainly keeps me on my toes!

Money Work

L has been saving her coins in her piggy bank for ages now and we decided it was time to roll them so she could take them to the bank.  L gets spare coins from us and also gets to keep the money from helping to return the bottles to the bottle depot.

The last time we did this L just helped to sort the coins and put them in the rollers.  This time we added all the steps and also turned it into a lesson about money.

First step.  Sort the coins.  Turns out we had quite a few American coins as well so we had to talk about the difference and the fact that our banks will take American coins(although I'm pretty sure it doesn't work the other way around!)

While we were doing this we looked at the Canadian coin sheet I printed out and talked about the names of the coins and what was on each one.

Once we had finished sorting L found each of the coins to match the amounts I wrote out on another piece of paper and we talked about how much each coin was worth.

 We started with the pennies.  I made this sheet for her with columns in tens to help her count out the 50 pennies needed to go into the roller.

 The most rewarding part.  Putting the pennies into the roller.  She was so proud that she'd done it all herself this time!  She then moved on to the dimes and used the same sheet for $5.00 this time.

We didn't get through all of the coins so we will continue this work another day and then L will take all of her rolled coin to the bank to deposit into her account.  She knows we use this money to pay for dancing, skating and swimming lessons and for skiing.  I think it's great that she is learning to contribute to pay for the things she likes to do.

Money, money, money, money!

One of the first things we did when we moved here is open up a bank account for L. She got a free piggy bank with the account. Every so often she will do the rounds with it and ask if we have any change. It got so full that we decided to sort all of the change and then roll it so we could take it to the bank.

I couldn't believe how long she stuck with this and filled about six rolls with coins.

The next day we took the bag of change rolls to the bank and L got to deposit them into her account. She knows that this is where we save her money so she can do things like go swimming, take classes and go to school in September. I believe it's never to early to start learning about the value of money and how to spend it wisely.

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.

Montessori Monday

This post should probably be called Tonging Tuesday since L's been doing tons of tonging and it's already Monday night but oh well.
In honor of Valentines Day I thought we'd better do our bit so we made up these red and white ice cubes. Before she went to bed L poured some diluted cranberry juice into a heart ice cube tray. I didn't take a picture because I was too busy doing damage control. She's just getting the hang of stopping when she pours ; ) She also poured regular water into a circle ice cube tray.

The next day we put them all together into a bowl and she sorted them with her tongs. My mom named this activity "sort and suck"
I bought some colored wooden beads and added them to the felt beads I made. L really enjoyed making necklaces with them. We used a tapestry needle and some leather cord. The tapestry needles are great because they aren't sharp. Can anyone tell me though how to put the holes in the felted beads? My husband and I had a heck of a time trying to push a needle through.

More tonging.

Using the ever popular heart ice cube tray to put in little glass hearts. This is actually harder than it looks as the hearts have to be put in just right to fit properly.

L was chomping at the bit while I was preparing this activity. When I'd finally put it all together she sorted all of the objects in about two seconds. Once of those activities that took me way longer to prepare than for her to do! She's really got the hang of first letter sounds this past little while and can tell me things that start with a specific sound. We're going to have to move on to last letter sounds I suppose.

You might notice the table cloth in the background of these pictures. Due to my back we've had to move to the kitchen table to do most of the activities. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon. : )