Chutes and Ladders, Math and Story Telling

This week we've been slowly getting into the groove of things.  M's been visiting all her favorite trays (that haven't been changed since Jan!) and D has been brushing up on Language and Math.  We've spent quite a few afternoons playing a couple of board games, days that have been too cold to get outside that is.  I purchased this Vintage "Chutes and Ladders" game at a yard sale, last summer for a buck.  It is in a nice wooden case with a neat spinner.

Apart from the obvious Math lessons that can be accomplished on side while playing, we had a bit of story telling fun too! You see, in this version of the game, the board has pictures of children doing good deeds and as a reward you go up the ladder when you land on the square and there are pictures of children of doing bad deeds and you go down the chute when you land on these squares.  The pictures range from planting trees, helping a sibling, etc for good deeds and pulling a friend's braid, fishing where you aren't supposed etc. for bad deeds.  So D spent a good part of the time while we were playing, imagining and narrating a story around each of these deeds! Was a lot of fun!

Hello and Happy Spring!

Hello All!

Hope you remember us! We were on a 2 1/2 month break from blogging as well as traditional homeschooling that started way back in February.   We've been visiting family abroad and it was real nice to spend time with the grandparents.

Anyway, now we are back and after a week of taking rest and getting over the jet-lag, we started with school today.  There was tremendous enthusiasm and we started with some handwriting practice and basic grammar work.   I am going through what we were doing this past January and will create works based on that for the rest of this month to brush up on things.

It is Spring and once the weather gets warmer, I suspect that we will spend a ton of time outdoors, so most of the schooling will happen outdoors.  We've missed schooling and I've missed blogging!  We are glad to be back and getting on with our routine!

Winner - Karen Tyler's Montessori Course Giveaway

We have a winner! Congratulations Cris!

I will send your email address to Karen and she will get in touch with you! Congrats again!

Giveaway - Karen Tyler's Montessori Training Program

As many of you are probably aware, I took the Karen Tyler's Montessori Training Program and am going to complete it the end of this month.  I cannot measure how invaluable this course has been in implementing Montessori inspired learning at our home.  Her culture albums alone are worth the cost of the course!  She provides a lot of support as well as answers in detail and promptly any questions you might have, which is a real boon when you are a naive homeschooler!

To know more about this course please visit www.worldwidemontessorionline.com or email Karen at karen@amontessorimarketplace.com.

Karen has graciously offered a giveaway to the readers of this blog and opportunity to take the course that is due to begin, March 31st.  All you need to do to win this fabulous course is to leave a comment on this post with your email address.  If you choose to follow this blog or if you already are a follower, you gain an extra entry, so leave a comment saying so to be counted.  This giveaway closes next Friday, by 2/10 midnight.  Good luck!

** This giveaway is now closed ***

Winter Word Study

Now that D is reading quite well, we moved into Word Study.  Currently we are focussing on Syllable Counting and Compound Words.  We already covered a few basics while we were going through All About Spelling Level 1, so this work is not new to D.

As part of identifying syllables in words, I put together a few words that were winter themed. D will need to identify and sort 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 syllable words.  I don't have pictures of the tray, but you can download this here.

Once she is able to easily sort these, we will move on to breaking up each word into its individual syllables.  The plan is to provide a bunch of toothpicks and D will use those to break it into its individual syllables.

For Compound Word study, I created these penguin themed Compound Word cards, that D will match.
You can download that set here.  As always these are for your personal use only and if you share it, please link back to this blog!

Antarctica Report

After our unit on Antarctica, I asked D to illustrate and write about any one thing that she wants from our unit on Antarctica.  This is her creation!

Scientist inside snow cave!

I love how she has layered her scientist (Sientest!) with all the warm clothes, boots and eye glasses!  This is now saved and is part of the Antarctica box!

New Math Works

Last week we've had awesome progress with D in Math.  In fact I was not that prepared, but somehow managed to pull through and put together trays for her!

We started off by learning to tell time.  We've had not done formal Montessori lessons on telling time, but D knows the basics from some of the books we read.  I had originally bought a "Classroom Scheduler" thing from Target last September.  At that time I wasn't sure how I was going to use it.  So, I used that and cut out the clocks and set it up so that D can learn to tell time to the hour.

She caught on quickly and then proceeded to learn to tell time to half past, quarter past and quarter to.  She was also very curious to know how to tell time at 5 min intervals.  Since she already knew how to skip count by 5s, I put together this tray quickly, using the pumpkin picks I already had.

Till now we've been skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s, but have never used bead chains.  I recently bought the short bead chains, so again, we did an impromptu lesson on bead chains for 10s and 5s.

I need to print out the proper colored arrows and set this up properly for her, so she can continue to skip count the various numbers.

She then started counting and wanted to do the hundred board and proceeded to finish that too!

This is another home-made material I made using a piece of card stock for the board.  I drew grid lines 1 inch apart using a marker.  I have some foam stuck on this card stock as a border and re-inforced using duct tape.  For the number tiles, I used 1 inch decorative glass tiles that I purchased from Lowe's and wrote the numbers with a permanent marker.  These tiles have a nice solid feel to them and they do not move!

As you've probably noticed from my previous week's post that we've also moved away from the concrete golden bead materials and into the stamp game.  Since I do not have the stamp game I've used the RightStart Material Base-ten cards.  We were at the point were D was feeling that the golden beads were a little too cumbersome to work with, so I introduced this and so far D is comfortable using these cards for addition, subtraction and multiplication, both static and dynamic.

I was glad that D was on a roll last week and did so much! I love to "follow the child" at these times! (wink *)  We are going to be on a 2 1/2 month vacation starting Feb, visiting family abroad, so any work that gets done this month is awesome!