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.

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.

Tot School

E is 28 months old

 
We had a pretty good week of Tot School, working on our bird materials and our new Montessori materials.  We have been outside a LOT this week, putting mulch down in the backyard, weeding the garden, and watering the new plants.  I bought E her own watering can and she loves to help me water the irises and tomatoes.  As for our indoor work, we had 3 good days of school, plus our letter of the week playdate this morning.  All in all, a successful week!

Math and Sensorial:

E worked with the geometric solids, naming them and matching them to the little wooden cards that came with them.  There are a couple of triangles, a square, circle, and rectangle.  I had her find all the solids that matched a shape: for example, for the square she found the cube, rectangular prism, and the square pyramid.  She is still not convinced that the sphere is a sphere and not a "ball."

I pulled out the pattern block pattern cards from confessions of a homeschooler, and E did several of them in one sitting.  She made me do some too - they're fun and relaxing, even for adults!

She also worked with the geometric cabinet.  I pulled out the cards that go with the demonstration tray, and she matched up the shapes to all three sets of cards (solid shape, thick outline, and thin outline). 

E loves to work with the sandpaper numbers.  She tries to trace them with her finger, but mostly we work on naming them and putting them in order.

We did a bit of work with the knobbed cylinders - she's been begging for #4, so I pulled it out.  She lost interest in it pretty quick when she found out it was too hard for her right now. 

She also worked with the pink tower, but no pictures!  She didn't want to make a tower with it, only a staircase.  So that's what we did and we let the baby cube walk all the way down and back up.  She is having difficulty seeing her mistakes when she builds the tower.  I am thinking of pulling out every other block  to make it easier for her to notice when she places one wrong.

Language:

E has also been begging for the sandpaper letters, so I had to come up with some ways for her to use them that don't involve tracing.  She's not ready for that and I don't want her to learn it wrong.  So we used the letters in conjunction with our alphabet box.  She worked on letter b.  I REALLY need to get more miniatures for my box!!  She would do this work for hours if she could, but I don't have enough items.  I am going to buy the picture sets from Montessori for Everyone, just have to get around to it!

The other alphabet activity we worked on was a major undertaking.  We laid out all all the letters in order (singing the alphabet song) and then matched our magnetic capital letters to them.  Some I handed her the capital and told her to find the lowercase, and some I showed her the lowercase and had her find the capital to match.  Some took a bit of thinking time, but she completed all of them with minimal help from me.  (She mixed up p and d, for example, and h and n). 

Science - Birds:

I finally got around to making my bird materials (from the Feathers for Lunch lapbook from homeschool share).  E did a part to whole matching activity:

(Does anyone know the names of all these birds?  I got most of them, but there are a few I can't find, and of course, they're the ones E wants to know the names of!)

We labeled the parts of a bird:

Did a sort of characteristics of a cat and a bird:

And made a cute bird craft!

Whew!  I think that's enough for one week, don't you??  To see what more tots are doing, check out Carissa's blog!