Tot School: Plus One

E is 29 months, K is 3 1/2 years

I had intended to take the summer off from "school time," but my neighbor approached me about teaching her little boy a couple of days a week.  I couldn't pass up that opportunity, so we are doing school for the summer now!  I gave E a couple week break this month, and we go on vacation the end of July, so she'll get another break then.  Other than that, it's going to be business as usual, but with and extra child (or two) around!  E is almost 2 1/2 now, and we're really starting to get into the Montessori materials.  I'm trying to follow her as best as I can, having K around should help her get more interested in some of the materials she's been unwilling to try.  It's always more fun to try something after you've seen another kid do it.  K is 3 1/2, and attends a regular preschool during the school year.  He has taken to things very well, I've only had him for two days so far, and it's interesting to see what work he chooses and how long he works with things.  E is still in a toddler mindframe much of the time, and will often pull something out, work for 2 minutes, announce she's done, and put it away.

This week, I had E work with the knobbed cylinders.  I had her do #1 and #2, and then I showed her how to do both at once.  She did pretty well  with it!

I also introduced the yellow box of knobless cylinders to E this week.  I showed her how to line them up like stairs, and how to stack them into a tower.  I think she likes them because they are bright.

We worked on the pink tower with only 5 cubes.  She still builds it wrong!  I usually help her once, asking "which cube is the biggest?" and then letting her work on her own.  At some point, she'll have to start seeing her mistakes, right??

Other work E chose this week included the sound jars (she LOVES these!), and writing numbers in the sand tray, using the sandpaper numbers as a reference.  She doesn't do very well at all with this, but she loves to "write" in the sand.  I allow it as long as she is actually trying to write.  When she starts putting her whole hand into the tray, I remove it and tell her we can try again tomorrow.

E also chose to work with the geometric cabinet this week, after watching K with it.  I did finally get all my knobs glued back on, so I am hoping to introduce some of the drawers next week to both K and E.

K flitted around a bit at first, which is normal, I would say, for being in a new environment!  He really enjoyed our sorting works, he did the fruit sorting and the butterfly tonging exercises I had set up for quite a while.

I also showed him the yellow knobless cylinders, after I had presented them to E.  He thought stacking and unstacking them was pretty cool.  It amazes me how different his thought process seems to be, only a year older than E.  He really thought about where to put each cylinder so that they were all arranged correctly.

But his favorite work of the week was the sandpaper letters and sand tray.  He traced the letters after me, then worked on tracing them in the sand.  His "letters" looked absolutely nothing like what they were supposed to, but he was concentrating on them so hard!

To wrap up our week, both E and K worked on pin-punching a butterfly.  Neither one was very interested.  K gave up after a few pokes, and E ended up coloring hers, although she did come back to it this weekend to do some more punching.