Currency/Coin work

Like any other kid, D has always been interested in coins and money.  So I quickly put together some works to get her familiar with basic coins.  We started off with the penny, nickel, dime and quarter.  First I put together this sorting tray, where she sorts and identifies the value of the coins.

We extended this to our practical life area with some penny polishing.  

D takes a penny from the bowl and sets it on the paper towel.  Then she puts two/three drops of lime juice and also spoons some salt on to the penny.  She uses a q-tip (not in the picture above!) to polish the penny.  She flips the coin and does the same to the other side.  She rubs the penny with the cloth and puts the polished penny into the bottle on the right.  D loved this and it was awesome how shiny each penny became!  Here is D polishing the penny!

I am planning to put out more work on the coins to teach her to combine denominations and learn the values.  Plus I will also play some shopping games with her so she can put to use what she learns!  I will post more as we proceed with her lesson!

Some pink tower and brown stairs extensions

D and I together did some pink tower/brown stairs extensions.  These two have been sitting untouched for quite some time in our school room.  Doing this has revived some interest, plus I am planning to print these pictures and have them for future reference.

We found these at our favorite sites in the montessori blog world!

We are still here

We are still here! With the weather being nice most of our days have been spent outside, but we did get some school time too!  Here is some of what we've been up to...

An oldie, but a goodie! A variation on cards and counters.  D does this with so much ease, but I keep this work out regularly with some minor variations as repetition is always good!

Color box three!  This again is done with ease, but we just love the look of it!  She did this work after ignoring it for a long time!

Continent pin map that we found here.

Tracing with the insets.  I usually cut the paper to size and have color pencils out following traditional montessori.  But this day I just let her have a go at it with just regular paper and markers and let her make her own designs.  She worked on this for the longest time ever!

Salt spooning.  I usually don't have any spooning work for D as she is very comfortable with spooning and just plays with it.  But I had a penny polishing (will post on that soon) activity out and D was enjoying spooning the salt, so I put this together quickly.  This held her interest for a couple of days.

Other than this we did more activities, but each one deserves its own post.  So I will update in the next few days on the other activities that we did!

Toddler Montessori

I've introduced some works to M in the montessori area.  I have the bottom couple of shelves from one of our shelves in our school room assigned to M where her works are set up.  Here are some pictures of M in action!

We have the mini knobbed cylinders that I got from KidAdvance.  M is so drawn to those, so I let her have a go at the first set.  As you can see from the picture above she uses the correct grasp!  I don't know if this is too early for her as she is only 13 months old, but she seems so ready and interested and look at her focus and concentration in that picture! (On a side note, don't you love the chubby little hand and feet in the picture! My baby is growing up so fast!)

She is dropping some craft sticks through the piggy bank slot.  She has been practicing for months now and is a real expert in this!

Another variation and this time she is dropping some large buttons of different shapes through the slot.

We usually work in the morning for 10 - 15 mins and close up the school room for M to prevent her from getting into all of D's work.  But she sneaked into the school room later on that afternoon and I found her doing this!

She had emptied the bottle of all the Q-tips that it had (another work that I had out for her) and dropped all the crayons and pencils through the opening into the bottle!  Love how she invented this work for herself! Definitely a Montessori child!

Art Outdoors

All of you would know our adventures with sand and water play the past few weeks but I was getting a bit tired of finding sand everywhere in the house, in spite of strict rules of a bath as soon as they come inside and before the kids touch anything.  I cant figure out how, but there is sand everywhere! So to change things a bit I decided to add an easel, some finger paints and a few spray bottles with colored water.  M could not squeeze the triggers so she just did some finger painting and wandered off.  So I set up another station at her height where she could just sit on the floor of the deck and do her finger painting, but D had a lot of fun with her materials and mixing colors!  We rounded up the day by cleaning up in our yard sprinklers and drying off in the night breeze!  Here is a picture of D having fun with her easel and art materials!  I definitely like this idea of doing art outside whenever possible, the cleanup is sooooo easy!

Sand plus Water - Childhood fun

I got a big fisher price sandbox for $5 on a garage sale this weekend.  I added a couple of plastic boxes for water play in addition to this sandbox.  D and M are having a blast everyday!  We have tons of beach/sand/water toys that are used frequently in addition to leaves, branches and flowers.

D is at a stage where her imagination runs wild.  She is out there having a picnic or making soup or baking cookies!  Our sandbox is a big attraction and I find our neighborhood kids often crowded in our backyard.  M is just one and she plays for the sensory aspect of mud and water.  She is good most of the times in not putting things in her mouth, but I still watch her like a hawk!  At times I find her imitating her sister often ending up in a battle for using the same thing. Joys of sisterhood!  Here is a peak of both of them having a blast at our back yard!

Our Update

The weather has been beautiful out here and we've been enjoying outside time a lot. Since we are out so much there has been less time in the montessori room. But we did sneak in a few days here and there to keep in touch. 

In math D is working on her unlimited bead materials trying to form complex numbers. She is getting real better at this.

In language I've been taking it real slow in the reading area, but D is has been real curious on a lot of sight words that she sees in the books we read and has mastered some those on her own! Other than this we are still working on completing the 40 sounds based on the Dwyer scheme, we are almost there! There has been a writing explosion lately and letters, cards, stories and what not has been done here! My house is now littered with so much of D's drafts! It is a good thing though!

On the cultural side, after our unit on Matter, we started our unit on Living/Non-living. I will post about this one of these days. We are also working on the continents and I am still collected and sorting and putting together our continent boxes! Since we've been out so much D's natural curiosity about plants in general has peaked. So I am catching that and trying to introduce the botany works. Some of my puzzles from Adena have arrived. The flower and leaf ones are back ordered, I am going to see if I can do without these.

On sensorial, D has mastered the Power of two cube and is now working on the knobless cylinders. I am going to introduce the binomial cube soon.

Practical life is just daily practical life right now. Helping clean up, make her own snacks, general grooming and a lot of grace and courtesy as she is out and about with kids her own age in the backyard is just what is happening in that area.

We've been visiting the library a lot and reading tons as usual. I am trying to sneak in non-fiction books based on the interest of the day and it has been working well. So that is what we've been up to.

With nice days few and far between in our State, we've been trying to maximize our time outside. Kids need to be kids, academics, montessori, all will follow eventually!