Thanks to everyone who linked up last week. I'm crazy excited to see how much Montessori Monday is growing!
Last week was another 3-hour work cycle for us. The boys have adjusted quite quickly to the longer work cycle and I'm pleased with how much the extra time is helping them learn. Last work our Montessori day was in the afternoon after a very exciting field trip to the fire station, so both boys had a hard time at first sitting down and focusing. After about 30 minutes though they were both settled down and stopped jumping from lesson to lesson.
Both of the boys enjoyed a shell scrubbing lesson I set out on Pita Pocket's shelf. First they had to add a drop of dish soap the cup and then pour the water in:
Then it was time to scrub!
Pita worked on cutting strips of paper. The strips were just wide enough for one single cut. His goal was to cut on each black line I'd drawn and then put the cuttings in a bucket. He will use the cuttings in another lesson next week:
Pita also worked (while sitting in my lap!) with our snapping frame. He was able to easily unsnap and certainly understood the mechanics of re-snapping, but his little fingers just aren't strong enough yet. Any tips on making this easier?
Short Pants really enjoyed his new logic game Hoppers Jr. He worked through about half of the puzzles and asked that we bring it upstairs the next day so that he could work with it some more:
Pita Pocket kept busy playing with the moon sand and space play dough from last week. We had an umm...throwing...incident with the moon sand so he had to get out the sweeper and clean up afterwards:
During circle time last week Short Pants and I worked on skip counting by 5s. He caught on *very* quickly, but I wanted to make sure he understood concretely why skip counting is helpful. I got out 20 of our 5 bead bars and told him that I needed to count them all. I started counting by 1s and then showed him how much faster it was to count the bars by 5s. Next he counted by 5s, laying out each bar as he said the correct number:
Then I pulled out our hundred board control chart and had him count off the 5s while laying translucent tiles over them. This was a good way to double-check his number identification too. I originally saw this idea used for the multiplication tables over at The Learning Ark:
Next we used each strip of numbers to play a "mystery number" game with. For example, I'd say, "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10. It is smaller than 8 but more than 4. (between each hint Short Pants would guess a number by laying his tile on his guess) My number is 2 less than 7." Short Pants had a BLAST doing this. I love the joyful expression on his face as he correctly identifies the mystery number in this picture!
Pita Pocket reviewed "living" and "non-living" by sorting pictures. The cards were a free download from jojoebi:
He also built the pink tower all by himself vertically:
Worked with our dragonfly puzzle:
And also worked with a pouring lesson:
Both boys also strung wooden spools. It was really neat to see how easily Pita was able to do this; just a few months ago he still had trouble:
They also explored our landforms together. Pita won't have his formal presentation of them till this fall, but Short Pants went through and told him the names of each one:
Short Pants also worked at tonging pasta and sorting it by shape. He has really been drawn to practical life lately, so I've been trying to put out a lot of those activities for him:
Pita Pocket surprised me by announcing that he was going to work with two knobbed cylinder blocks at the same time. He was very excited when he completed this work!
He also worked at folding cloths horizontally and diagonally. Such a tough job for little hands:
I didn't get the chance to take any pictures, but Short Pants and I also continued his work in astronomy last week. I introduced the solar system to him and we looked at coloring sheet, noting the difference in the number of moons per planet. We also talked about the sun and looked at a picture of it. Next we looked at our shadows and discussed how a shadow is something that blocks the sun. Afterwards we used a flashlight in a darkened room and shone it on our globe to demonstrate how day is when the sun shines on our continent and how it is night when the earth turns and we are in shadow. Both of the boys really had fun taking turns making it day and night on the globe!
If you have some Montessori lessons/ideas to share, please link up below. Please also make sure to either place the Montessori Monday button from the sidebar in your post or put a link back to this blog in your post. And don't forget to go visit my co-host Deb over at Living Montessori Now!