More Letter L

We had so much fun with our letter L activities last week, we decided to continue with them this week.  We went for a nature walk and collected the first fall leaves of the season.  You have to grab them fast around here!  One day they're green, the next they're yellow, and the third day the wind has been blowing and they're all gone from the tree!

E helped me press the leaves (very carefully) with the iron, and then we strung them up into buntings for our windows.

We also did a falling leaves craft a la No Time for Flashcards (can you tell what my favorite go-to website for kids crafts is??)  I traced some of our fall cookie cutters for the leaves and let E paint them. 

Once the paint was dry, I cut them out and we glued them on a construction paper spiral.  It looks so neat hanging in our dining room, and it spins around when the wind blows throught the window.

I wanted to get to a couple more leaf activities, but there weren't enough leaves yet.  Perhaps this week we'll be able to get a few purple ash and maybe our maple tree will start turning!

As far as Montessori activities go, this was not an outstanding week.  E did not have much interest in doing work in the schoolroom.  She did decide to do some work with the geometric tiles and geometric solids.  I think one day she spent 40 minutes on one picture, putting tiles on and taking them off again.

She also figured out how to make the tiles stand up on the table, very exciting!

Linking up to Toddler Tuesday and Tot School.

Letter L Day

We had such a busy week this past week.  It always gets like that the week before I do my freezer cooking.  More on that later, but needless to say, not a lot of Montessori work got done.  We did have one good morning of work before we had to rush off to the library and dance class on Friday.  The highlight of E's Montessori work this week was all of the knobbed and knobbless cylinder work she chose to do.  I finally got around to making some cards for the knobless cylinders, and she really enjoyed using them. 

Our really fun day was Thursday, when we hosted another of our "Letter Playdates."  This week was Letter L.  We read Is Your Mama A Llama? by Deborah Guarino.  Then we moved to the kitchen to make our fridge letters.  I had a few options for the kiddos this time around:  leaf stickers, fabric leaves to glue on, or real leaves (from last year that I saved) to crumble over the glue.  I think ALL of the kiddos chose leaf stickers.  Their Letter L for Leaves turned out really nice!  And I was impressed that all the "big" girls could peel the backs of their own stickers. 

Then, for snacktime, we enjoyed some lovely "L" treats: lemon bread/cake, longjohns, and ladybugs!  E and I assembled the ladybugs the morning of the playdate out of strawberries, grapes, and mini chocolate chips.  They turned out really cute and E had a lot of fun making them! 

I am going to continue our letter L theme into this week with a few more L books (Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney and Leaf Man by Lois Elhert).  We are going to do a nature-collecting walk to get some leaves, and hopefully we will make our own leaf pictures like the Leaf Man book.  Has anyone done leaf preserving with Mod Podge?  I tried contact paper last year and wasn't impressed.

Our Week in School

We are finally settling down into a routine!  Hopefully that means I will find a bit more time to blog about what we've been up to.  Right now, we are doing school time Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.  I am trying to make at least two of those days work time in the school room, Fridays are sometimes work time in the school room, and sometimes other projects to go with our theme. 

I have dubbed this week "the week of towers."  E chose to work with all the sensorial materials that she has been avoiding.  She built stairs and towers with the pink tower, brown stair, and yellow and green knobbless cylinders.  First, she built each material as a staircase, and then she stacked them up to make a tower.

Other sensorial work she chose this week included the geometric solids - doing a card sort of sphere and cylinder, shape tiles, and the sound jars.

E is still into all the language works I have put out.  This week, I changed up her begining sound sort.  Now she's working on /t/ and /f/.  She gets it in three ways: our alphabet box (if she asks to do the alphabet box, those are the drawers I pull for her), the sound sort cards, and our alphabet BOB books (I leave STU and EF out for her on top of the box).  I also changed out the Laurie CVC puzzles, now she's working on car and pig.

E also learned to put together the whole continent puzzle on her own this week!  That's quite an accomplishment for her - puzzles on the whole are not her strong suit.

As far as practical life activities go, E has been helping me in the kitchen quite a bit.  This week she helped me make Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Muffins.  No pictures of that, cooking with a 2 1/2 year old is enough - I don't need the camera, too!

On the shelf, she worked with the clothespin color wheel, as well as tonging apple buttons into an ice cube tray (she ended up using her fingers instead), and our spooning material.

This week was one without art projects!  I know, I know, how could I let the week go by!!  We've been playing a lot of games instead.  E's favorites right now are from our Leap Frog game box: Alphabet Go Fish and Dominoes.  She's getting pretty good!

Outdoors time this week was a visit to a farm.  This was such a fun trip!  I'll have to do a separate post on that, because I used the film camera and the pictures are all still being developed.

Linking up to Tot School and Toddler Tuesday.

Tot School

We had a busy week of school and other activities last week.  So busy, I couldn't get to the computer to write about it!  So busy, in fact, I forgot to take a lot of pictures.  But I guess that's how you know we've been working hard!

This week I presented part of the "metal insets" to E.  We don't actually have metal insets, we are just using our geometric cabinet.  I discovered a few weeks ago that she could trace the inside of a stencil, so I wanted to pull this out for her.  She was so excited about it!  Right now, we are only working on the first step, tracing the inside of the frame. 

E also really likes the new language works I've put out this fall.  The Laurie word puzzles are her favorites right now.

She has also done some beginning sound sorting with our alphabet box and the alphabet cards from Montessori for Everyone.

She does not choose sensorial work very often.  I certainly hope that changes as she gets a bit older!  But this week she did choose to work with the matrushka dolls.  (Ours are from the Simpsons - ha!)

Practical life work this week included things like sweeping pom poms off the floor and helping to clear the table and load the dishwasher after dinner.

We started our apple unit this week, and did a couple of art projects.  E painted green leaves onto a tree trunk, and then glued red pom poms down for apples. 

Later in the week, we did some apple printing (though the final product doesn't really look like it!) and made a letter A for Apple Prints to hang on our alphabet wall.

You may remember one of my goals for school this year is to get outside more.  We had planned to go on a short hike in the mountians this week, but then there was this fire.  So we settled for taking a walk around a pond near our house and playing at the park.  Still lots of fun, and hopefully the fires (yes, now there are more than one!) will be calmed down by the end of this week and we can go to the mountians then.

I'll be linking this post up to Toddler Tuesday and Tot School.

First Day of School!

Today was the day!  I've been preparing materials, organizing shelves, and talking up "school time" with E for the last couple of weeks, and we finally started school today.  She was so excited to start!

E did great work today.  I am AMAZED at the change in just two months.  She is truely ready for these materials.  When we were working with our friend K, there was a lot of whining and "You [I] can't do that."  Today, E eagerly chose materials off the shelves and would have worked much longer than the hour and a half I had allotted, if we didn't have other places to be this morning!

We started our day with our Morning Song.  Really, we start every day with this song, singing as we get dressed. 

Morning has come, rise with the sun.

Come, now, and sing, everyone.

Morning has come, rise with the sun.

Give good cheer.

After our morning song, we talked about the weather using our chart from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

The first work E chose was her shape stacker.  She just played with it for a little while, and eventually we worked on fitting together the square shapes, and sorting the shapes into their correct piles.  We didn't work on biggest to smallest so much today.

After that, E chose to work with a new material - some CVC Laurie puzzles.  I have "cat" and "dog" out on the shelf so far.  We worked with one puzzle at a time and talked about beginning and ending sounds.  She's good with beginning sounds, but I don't think she really understands what I'm talking about when I ask about the ending sounds.

Then we did some geometry work - both the geometric cabinet and the geometric solids.  She chose the rectangle drawer and just did it like a puzzle.  We reviewed the names of the geometric solids, and I showed her the cards I made with pictures of other objects that match the solids.  Right now I have out rectangular prisms and spheres.  Together, we sorted the cards to fit with the correct solid.  Rectangular prisms were things like a tissue box and a train car.  Spheres were things like an orange and a soccer ball.

Some more sensory work followed, as we built a tower with the green knobless cylinders.  This required a lot of help from me, constantly reminding her what she was looking for (the largest cylinder).

Her best work of the morning was pouring lentils.  She must have poured for 15 minutes!  We also got to have a lesson (or three) with the broom and dustpan.  She was so proud of herself that she cleaned up her own mess!

While E was pouring, I pulled out a tweezing work - apple buttons into a flower ice cube tray.  Of course, she had to do the work after me.

To end our morning, we put together our giant Alphabet Train floor puzzle.  I helped with alphabetical order, but she found all the pieces and put them together.  And then had great fun pushing it along the carpet!

What a morning!  After all THAT, we went for craft time at church, and then out to lunch to celebrate our first day of school.  Now I think I need a nap.  :)

Linking up to Toddler Tuesday at One Hook Wonder

July Sensory Bin

We loved our birdseed sensory bin from May so much that I did not make another one for June.  I was pondering ideas for a new tub and decided to go really girly and sparkly!  So here is our box for July, just a little bit early!

It's so sparkly!!  Three types of pony beads, large opaque, large translucent, and small opaque, plus craft jewels and scoops and a neat Japanese style spoon.  Obviously, this is not a box for smaller children who still put things in their mouth, and I only let E use it when I am watching.  She's pretty good about that kind of thing, but you never know . . . 

A Little Practical Life

We are just now starting to get into the swing of things with our Montessori materials.  We actually did a lot of work this past week, you can check it out on this Tot School post from Friday.  E has been getting more interested in practical life activities, and her favorite one right now is helping me water the plants outside.  I bought E her own watering can, I fill it up for her from the hose, and tell her which plants to water.  She is learning the names of the plants as well as how to use the watering can and carry it without spilling. 

Carrying the watering can

 Watering the small lilac

 Watering the big lilac

 Watering the daisies

 And the peonies