Back on track with Montessori

Well, I had completely gotten off track with introducing Montessori activities the last couple of months.  And the few things I had on the shelf were completely ignored by the girls.  So today I revamped a couple of activities and reintroduced them, letting the girls know they can get them off the shelf if they would like to work with them. I still think they are not understanding they can get them off the shelf on their own.  Of course, with Amelia, she prefers to get into the stuff and play with it, losing it or making a huge mess.  So right now we have the spooning on the shelf with elbow macaroni in it.  And Amelia still prefers using her hands, but she persevered longer than usual using the spoon.

I changed from pony beads to the foam beads in the bead threading onto a pipe cleaner activity.  At first I thought Amelia would have a difficult time with it because the holes are smaller, but she did great.

Our pattern bead activity started out as a threading onto a string activity as well.  Unfortunately, the plastic needle that came with it has been lost (wouldn't surprise me if it was down the heater vent that is right next to the stand) so it has just become a pattern matching activity.  Tabitha did a great job with the pattern cards, but soon decided it would be more fun to stack them and make them into a "hamburger."

I'm looking forward to being more on track from now on, but with the baby, who knows.  

Head on over to One Hook Wonder to see what others are doing with Montessori.

 

Our Montessori Activities: Fine-Motor Counting Activities

I introduced a couple of slightly new activities this week. I did leave the spooning cottonballs on the shelf as they still remind me of snow, but they didn't seem interested in it. I replaced the heart picks with red chenille stems for the girls to place in the cheese shaker.

I added a new dimension to this activity by having the girls place pony beads or cheerios on the stems.

I had Tabitha sort 5 different color beads onto the stems, making it a color sorting activity for her.

In addition, each color represented a different number of beads. When she was finished putting them on the stems she got to count them and place them on a number mat I made.

I only went to 5 because I didn't want to overwhelm her. I think it was a little simple for her (She picked them right out of the shaker and put them in the correct spot), so I am going to make a mat representing the numbers 0-10. I didn't allow Amelia to use the beads because I had found her trying to eat them earlier in the week when I was setting up the activity. So she got to use cheerios. No pictures of her putting the cheerios on though.

I also changed the tonging activity again, to go with the theme. I call this the build-a-snowman tonging activity.

I am also linking to

Carnival of Maths Play

Started "N" lessons

At the beginning of last week I was feeling so encouraged. I had prepared our lessons for the letter N. Then we each took turns being sick. So we didn't get to do everything exactly as planned. But, we are continuing "N" this week.

So, on to the lessons/projects that we got done. Though I was feeling blah on Monday Amelia really seemed like she wanted to do something. So after dinner I let her glue shredded brown paper on her nest and then glue on her eggs that she colored blue. I had planned on them painting a tree/branch on some construction paper so we could glue the nest full of eggs to it, but that hasn't happened yet. Tabitha hasn't even had a chance to glue the eggs on as they got misplaced. I believe we will finish this project this week.

Next we dyed noodles. The girls helped count 10 rigatoni noodles into each bag, we did all six colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple (ok, we didn't do indigo). In order to dye the noodles I looked on various sites to get the instructions. I found two different options. Use rubbing alcohol or white vinegar. Using the vinegar was suggested to make them safer for the children and to make them edible. I chose to do an experiment. With the girls help we did the vinegar option. Here are the directions:

1) Place noodles in zippy plastic bag. (Lots of practice counting to 10)

2) Add 1 teaspoon of vinegar (or rubbing alcohol)

3) Add 5 drops of food coloring

4) Squish and shake the bag up until the color is evenly distributed and soaking into the noodles.

5) After finished with all the colors you are doing gently dump them onto wax paper (I covered cookie sheets with the wax paper so I could have room on my counter)

6) Let dry.

I did the rubbing alcohol version after the children were busy in the other room.

What I discovered was we prefer the rubbing alcohol. The colors come out much brighter and seem to be "soaked into" the noodles more thoroughly. Also, the vinegar ones became brittle. I can break them with slight pressure between my thumb and index finger. The ones with the rubbing alcohol didn't break with even more pressure. (Though they do break if you step on them! Ooops!)

Left-vinegar/Right-rubbing alcohol

I won't post all the colors, I figured these give the general idea. Of course if you want to use them for cooking you'll want to use the vinegar. But we used them the following day to make noodle necklaces and we really couldn't use ones that were cracked down the side.

Surprisingly, Tabitha did a great job threading the noodles onto yarn. I say surprisingly because we have never done it before. Even Amelia had the idea, she just couldn't get it to go through. I plan to keep practicing with this activity to help the fine motor skills. One little trick I tried was to leave the yarn attached to the skein so it wouldn't fall off the other end as they threaded. It worked really well!

In the above pictures the girls are standing in front of our Nn poster. I usually cut the N's out. I cut them out in green for the poster, white for our alphabet chart and the cover of their letter/sound books and black for inside the sound books. That was one thing I didn't feel was important last week as I was sick.

The words I chose to put on cards for this week that I could find sign language signs for are: nurse, nest and nickel. The other words I put on word cards are narwal, numbat, Noah's ark, and newt. We also learned to signs for noodle and necklace. Our verse for this week is :

No man can serve two masters...Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:24