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!

Super Snow

If you live in the Mid-west, winter this year has been blessed with such warm weather! It feels like spring actually.  But the kids sure miss winter! D's favorite season is winter and this year has been such a disappointment for her.  Also how can you do an Antarctic Unit without playing with snow?!!

I found this product called "Super Snow" at one of the teacher supplies store.  So we decided to make our own snow.  I greeted D with this set up one day.

The process is simple, you just measure one teaspoon of this product and mix it with 4 oz of water.

Stir and stir and stir....

Here is some snow!

We made a larger batch later and D had a blast.  I am keeping this away from M as she tends to taste whatever she plays with.  I never knew about this product till date, am I the only one?

MPS Giveaway

Check this awesome giveaway out!

Happy Birthday MPS!