Making a Compass

The biggest selling point these days at our house for school work is to say, "Lets do an experiment!"  So this tray was a huge hit!  This is another one from Karen's pages.

This tray has a need attached to the cork, a small piece of magnet, water in a bowl and our compass.

A close-up of the first cup.

All you do to make a compass is to rub the magnet on the needle for a looooong time to magnetize it and drop it in the bowl of water, as accurately as possible in the center of the bowl.  Wait and watch the needle slowly turn to point North.  Verify using your compass!

Pink Tower Perfection!

Look who can build the pink tower to perfection at 2 years and 5 months!

Please ignore the mess in the background, I was re-organizing!

Where is North?

I presented the "Where is North?" tray a few days ago to D from Karen's album.  Part of this presentation also includes a lesson on how to use the compass.  This is a simple work where you find the North wall of the room and label it.  I hand-wrote the label using an index card and did not bother to  laminate it.

Luckily for us the school room orients with the Cardinal Directions, so we successfully labelled our "North" Wall.

On another day we labelled the rest of the walls with labels matching E, S and W.

Flower and its parts

One day after playing in our backyard all morning, D came inside the house looking for me with a flower from our hosta plant.  She wanted know the what the name of those inner thread like things are.  So I pulled out our botany flower puzzle, the nomenclature cards and book (the ones that were collecting dust for while!) and let her explore and find out the answer herself.  

Here she arranged the various puzzle pieces under the part cards.

Then I helped her to carefully dissect the flower so she could match the real parts with the cards.

She read the booklet to understand the funtions.

Then she drew, colored and labelled the parts of the flower.

Primitive Maps

Since this will be the last year of primary for D, I am trying to present the lessons that I have not yet touched in the Karen Tyler Albums.  Last year we briefly worked on maps, so this year we started again.  One of the first presentations on maps is the primitive map presentation.

This tray shows a primitive map with some basic symbols showing the moon, mountains, water and tepee.

Here D is tracing the map on our salt tray.

Cosmic Nesting Boxes

Ever since I saw the Cosmic Nesting Boxes here I've been in love! What a great way to emphasize each person's place in the Cosmic World!  We cannot afford to buy it though so I began looking for alternate options.  I saw some awesome alternates at various blogs sites, but I just could not find enough nesting boxes!  Then while Garage Sale-ing this summer I saw this toddler nesting box and it was priced at .50 cents!  Even if you were to buy a new set of this it would cost you less than $20!

I then googled images of the internet and pasted it on the box.  I did not bother to cover up the rest of the designs on the box, though it would have been nice to!  I removed the 10th piece that this set comes with and replaced it with two "Pawns" (it you look closely at the picture below you should be able to see it on top!) from an un-used chess set to represent D and M!

On our culture shelf ready to be explored!

Pronoun Work

I have been really slacking in our language area though D's interest in Grammar and the function of words are at an all time high.  Between the work at home and all the co-ops and classes that we're attending I've just not had the chance to update our shelves.  So far we've worked to some extent on Nouns, Articles, Adjective and Verbs.  Anytime we read a story D always tries to figure out which work is which part of speech.  So recently she began asking questions about the pronouns we encounter while reading various books.  I quickly explained the concept of pronouns and flipped through some of the albums we have and put together this tray for her to work with.

All you do is take a poem or a nursery rhyme that the child is familiar with and replace all the pronouns with their corresponding nouns.  You also provide the actual pronouns so the child can work on replacing the nouns to make the poem sound right!

This is a great way to work on pronouns and D loved it!

Making Fraction Books

We are into making a book out of everything these days.  D is in her sensitive period for language and writing and we are taking full advantage of it!  The Fraction Work is not chosen often, so one day I greeted D in the school room with the proposal to make fraction booklets and it was well received!

I don't have a picture of our tray but it basically had 4 cut outs each of three shapes, a circle, square and a rectangle.  I started with story of how these were to be shared with only D and M.  Then two more guests arrive, so we had to divide and share it even further. The 4 more neighbors arrive and we had to share it even further.  So basically D had to cut out, paste and write the fraction for each division.

I introduced D to decorating her booklet with borders of her choice and she loved personalizing this!  In Montessori Elementary kids are often asked to personalize their work this way, so it was a good preparation for next year!

Of course M had to create and decorate her own booklet!

Canopic Jars and the Sarcophagus

We used the instructions in this book to make a Canopic jar.  We used Crayola Air Dry Clay to make it.  D made the body and lid of the jar and I had to help her make and paint the details of the Baboon Face.

But there was one problem with this, it was big enough not to fit our mummy's organs but the whole mummy itself! So we ended up making two tiny Canopic Jars.

D formed the shapes and I had to mold in the details.  Then we painted it and D asked me to fill in the details.

For the Sarcophagus, we decided to settle on a shoe box and the kids painted it red and golden.

Here is our mummy in its final resting place!  We even had an "Opening of the Mouth" ceremony!  We placed the mummy first in a coffin that we had recently purchased at a museum and the rest of the contents along with it!

We had an awesome learning experience with it.  In fact this topic led to discussion about the various ceremonies different cultures/religions follow and how it is done in Hinduism.  I need to search a few books on that topic for D to read at her level!