School This Week: The Tomten

I mentioned previously that we are trying something a bit different with our school time now.  Instead of being really strict with our Montessori time, I am branching out a little bit.  I looked through the Winter Wonderland curriculum over at Wee Folk Art, and I really like what I saw!  Wee Folk Art has a 12 week seasonal curriculum that is based in literature.  So we are trying bits and pieces of that along with our Montessori time, and so far it seems to be working well.

This week's picture book is The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren.  This was a new book to me and I loved it.  We read the book several times on Monday, and talked about the seasons and how the Tomten made tracks in the snow.  This would be great to do a couple of activities from Montessori for Everyone; I'm thinking the four seasons matching or the animal tracks activity.  Since I am planning on repeating this curriculum next year in the winter as well, I think I'll plan on using those then. 

On Wednesday, when we read through the story again, I pulled out some props and we acted out the story as I read.  I had made a set of rainbow gnomes for E for Christmas, so the red gnome was drafted to play the Tomten, and some of our Little People farm animals got in on the fun as well.  The purple parrot is pretending to be a chicken.  The white playsilk was for the snow, and the Tomten walked through the "snow" to check in on each animal.

After our story, we went upstairs to do some Montessori work.  I had a mat rolled out for E already with the pink tower cubes set up.  At first she did not want to work on that, but I told her she needed to do the pink tower first, and then she could choose a different thing to work on.  She built the tower correctly by herself and then I showed her how the smallest cube could "walk" along the edge of each bigger cube.  E thought that was pretty cool!

When she was finished with the pink tower, she did some good work with the brown stair and red rods before deciding it was time to go downstairs and do some music time.

I'm trying to incorporate some music into our school time each week.  You'd think that would be easy for me, after being an elementary music teacher, but somehow it's always the thing I forget about.  I'm going to save our music time for another post.  I'd like to get some good photos first, so you can see what we did with it.

We did several art projects for our first week of Winter Wonderland.  The curriculum suggests watercolor painting with salt, and I think we'll be doing that tomorrow.  We had a friend over for art and craft time and made the glittery window clings from Family Fun.  Ours did not turn out as expected, they're still beautiful, but I'm going to have to cut them out of the waxed paper and hang them with string. 

The other project we did was something I saw on Art Projects for Kids.  I drew snowflakes with white crayon on white paper and wrote E's name.  Then I cut the paper into quarters and had her paint each piece a different color with watercolors.  This turned out beautifully, and E was so excited to see her name revealed in the white crayon as she painted! (The picture is from Art Projects for Kids, so you could see what it looks like.  I didn't want to post ours since it has E's name all over the front of it)

I'm linking up to Montessori Monday and Preschool Corner.  Please take time to visit some of the other blogs linked up!  :)