What's on the Shelf?

As promised, here are the new activities out for E on her practical life shelf right now.

I switched up her pouring and used some of the red (orange) lentils and black beans from last month's sensory box.  I'm sure she's ready to try water pouring, but until she starts really paying attention to what she's doing with it, I'm not ready to try it on the school shelves.

Next to dry pouring is her spooning work: glass pebbles into a butterfly-shaped candy mold.  Which E, often as not, chooses to use her fingers instead of the spoon.

I pulled out an old activity that we haven't used for quite a while: sponging water!  E loves this activity, and will work happily with it for 20 minutes or so.  And she's gotten much better about not dripping water everywhere, so I'm happy.

On the bottom shelf, I FINALLY found a cheap appetizer tray with four sections to use for sorting.  Seriously, I don't know why this was so hard for me to find!  Last week, we dyed four different shapes of pasta into four different colors.  So her sorting can be done by color or by shape.

Next to the sorting work are our pumpkin life cycle three part cards.  I saw a neat tray/box for three part cards at Montessori Services - it had separate sections for the three sizes of cards.  I'm wondering if there is a way I could DIY it at home, it would be helpful to not have them sliding all over the tray all the time.

I also changed up our language shelf.  Nothing big over here, I just swap the letters out every week or so.  On the top shelf, we have our begining sound sort.  Right now E is working with /n/ and /k/. 

Our BOB alphabet books are on the top shelf as well, and I have the specific books with /n/ and /k/ out on top of the box.  E is always welcome to  take more books out of the box, but I like to put the letters we are working with on top for easy access.

Our Laurie CVC puzzles are on the middle shelf.  E loves these things!  I have eight different puzzles.  Right now, I try to put out ones that have no letters in common.  We talk about begining and ending sounds and she has to match the word to the picture.

Not pictured, but next to the CVC puzzles is our sand tray.  Right now, I will write a letter, and I have E trace it after me.  She wants so badly to learn to write her name, I thought this was a good first step.
On the bottom shelf is our alphabet puzzle.  I have a couple of different puzzles that deal with alphabetical order, and I rotate them to keep up her interest. 

Also on the bottom shelf, we have our geometric tile pictures.  These are another favorite and right now they get used almost every day.


I'll try to remember to post pictures again when I change out the shelf activities in a few weeks!

Musical Munchkin

 Are we ready to start piano lessons yet??? 

How about violin??  (although E tells me all the time she wants to play the flute like Mommy.)



playing "violin" with two of the brown stair blocks

I wonder if there are any good suzuki schools around here.  I can for sure do piano, but violin is a bit beyond me.

School this past week . . . or two . . . or three

Whew!  I took a bit of a break there!  Life has been getting a bit hectic, trying to fit in my work, E's school, housecleaning, and holiday crafting!!  I'm still feeling the pressure, so I probably won't be posting quite as much as we head into the holidays, but I'm going to try to get some school posts in here and there.  We ARE doing school time - 2 to 3 days a week.  I'm trying hard to keep 2 days with our Montessori work, the third day is often baking, nature walks, and art projects.  Another day in the week we have MOPS, our moppettes program is awesome, they really do some good "bible school" type work with the kiddos.

Anyhow, last week we had "pajama school!"  Every morning E woke up and wanted to do school work but would not get out of her jammies.  Isn't it great to be home and not have to put on real clothes until you want to?

Tuesday was an awesome day all around. I went to take a shower and when I came out, E was already hard at work with the continents map.

She also made up her own extension for the shape stacker.

 
I finally got around to printing out the pumpkin life cycle three part cards.  And I thought I would give it a go using the words as well as the pictures this time.  E really enjoyed the work.  I was pleasantly surprised that she was able to match most of the words on her own.  She got triped up on "seed" and "seedling" - I think that one was the only one she didn't self-correct. 

We also put together a pumpkin life cycle on a paper plate.  I got this printable from  A to Z teacher stuff, it includes a lesson plan (more for older kids) and these lift-the-flap type coloring pictures.  I had E match the words on this as well, first I wrote the word on the paper plate, then I had her find the coloring picture that matched and glue it on top of the word I wrote.

Other work E did this week included the sandpaper numbers (she traced them all and helped me put them back in the correct order), and the brown stair.  After she built the stair correctly on her own, I showed her how to match the pink tower cubes up to it.  E thought this was the coolest thing ever!  I just love the enthusiasm of the preschool set!

I'm currently (well as soon as I get off the computer) switching out practical life and language activities in the school room.  I'll have a post up on what's out as soon as I finish. 

Linking this post up to Montessori Monday at One Hook Wonder.

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.

Christmas Crafting in Progress!

I finally got to the craft store to pick up the yards and yards of felt I need for all of E's Christmas presents.  Can I just say right now that I LOVE felt?  Especially wool felt, but even the Eco-recycled stuff is good.  No finishing seams or hemming, no applique, and it stands up to play pretty darn well.  I've been working for the past two naptimes on E's card table playhouse.  I am discovering that our card table is pretty much on the tiny side - but I still think it's going to work out OK.  I am pretty much done with the front side.

There is the obvious, um, a door to get in and out, a plant (stuffed, and I plan to make flowers she can stick on it as well), and a mail box (the door opens and she will be able to drop mail into the house through the slot).  I also sewed a few "bricks" on there for ambiance.  All that is left is the edging for the top and to back it.  Not too bad for a couple hours work!

Other sides of the house will be a garden with an apple tree, a birdhouse, and at least one window.  Gotta have some light and air in that house, ya know?

We Play: Pumpkin Spice Playdough

I finally got to making up a new batch of playdough for E last week.  We had been using the crumbs leftover from E's birthday party, um, 10 months ago.  Pathetic?  Yes.  And it was just the storebought stuff.  I made up a batch using my favorite playdough recipe, colored it orange, and added a little pumpkin pie spice.  Mmmmmm!  This stuff smells amazing!  I set out the playdough in a plastic container, along with a couple of pumpkin cookie cutters.  The first day I put it out, E played with it for an hour straight!  Ahhh, the peace of a child playing contentedly!  :)

Freezer Cooking Resources

Recently, I've been asked a lot about my freezer cooking.  I LOVE how easy it makes my days.  I've had several questions about how it all works and I thought I'd write about a couple of good resources for freezer cooking that I have found.

Freezer cooking, once a month cooking, whatever you want to call it, is where you prepare meals in advance, freeze them, and they are ready to pull out and reheat when you need them.  With a busy 2 year old running around, and the fact that I work part time a few nights a week, means that I really appreciate NOT having to chop veggies or brown ground beef every night.  My husband (bless his heart) is also NOT a chef of any kind.  In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he's actually afraid of my kitchen.  So I can't count on him to whip up a meal when I'm tired or at work for the evening.  Enter freezer cooking.  I plan and spend one day each month or so (usually about every 5-6 weeks) cooking ALL. DAY. LONG.  When I am done, I have a whole month's worth of meals in my freezer, ready to be reheated for a quick dinner.

I started freezer cooking with 30 Day Gourmet.  I like this method because it's very organized.  I got the book from my library and in the back are all kinds of worksheets and spreadsheets.  Worksheets make me happy.  There are also a lot of recipes online on their website.  I don't like this method because the recipes are not particularly healthy - heavy on "cream-of" soups and breadcrumbs.

I found a couple more books for freezer cooking by some local authors:
Don't Panic, Dinner's in the Freezer.  I like this method because the recipes are healthier, and a bit more adventurous than plain old casseroles.  Things I don't like about it are that I've found some of the recipes don't really reheat all that well.

Most recently, I found onceamonthmom.com, and I am really liking it.  The recipes are pretty healthy (with a few tweaks of my own) and easy to prepare.  I LOVE that all the planning work is done for me!  Every month there is a new menu with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  The grocery list is done for me and the "game plan" so I know who needs to do what on our big cooking day (I usually cook with a friend).  The only thing I found is that the grocery list seemed to be off for this month.  We ended up with 2 huge bags of cheese left over and didn't have enough green chilis.  I think I'll do my own grocery list for next month.