Problem with the Short Bead Chain arrangement

As many of you know purchasing the Bead Chains is one of the most expensive affairs in your Montessori homeschool.  So I bought only the Short bead chains and squares (awesome price at Caliber Montessori), no box, no cabinet or wall stand.  I did not get the long bead chains for two reasons.  One being that I was not sure whether D would have the patience to work through those and the other being the price.  I am still not sure whether I should buy the long chains, but that is another story for later.  Coming back to the problem of the Short bead chains, I should have either bought the box or the wall stand.  Here is why.  I had originally set it up in a tray like this.

The chains in the bowl and squares stacked next to it and the small home made "notch paper" that can be used for counting.

The bead chain arrows in their individual containers.

Everything looked great till I observed D using this setup for a couple of days.

Yes! That is my little one sitting on a Pink Cube!

As you can see, since it was all in one tray, D assumed that she had to work on all the chains and do all the arrows in one sitting.  This was exhausting for her and she is done with math for the day as soon as she is done with this work.  Another problem is that there is no way to untangle and get only one bead chain, the chain she decides to work on that particular day from the bowl, without spilling the contents.

D is skip counting aloud after she completed the whole layout for every chain.

I don't think she would be able to memorize skip counting using different numbers if she works this way, she should be working on one chain for a few days till she masters it.  So, I finally decided to get the wall stand ($10 on most online stores).  Hopefully this should alleviate the problems I mentioned above.

Coming back to the issue of whether to get the long bead chains, for now, since my monthly budget will not allow it, I am going to see if I can have D work with the skip counting cards that we got as part of the RightStart Mathematics Level B.  Once I have the wall stand set up for the short bead chains, D can pick one number and get the corresponding chain, arrows and Skip Counting envelope and work with it.  The only issue is that she might not understand the cubes and how those relate to the long chains.

Each set has its own envelope.

How does this work in your homeschool?

More Odd/Even and Skip Coutning

We had a rain free week last week, so we spent a lot of time playing outside and enjoying it! We had only a couple of days of school last week.  One of those days I found D trying to use the bead bars to list the Odd and Even Numbers until 20.  It is amazing how versatile and open ended all of the Montessori Materials are.  Isn't spontaneous learning wonderful, especially when the adult plays no part in the initiation of the experience!

This led to a discussion of skip counting by 2's and D wanted to do all of her chains.  We only have the short bead chains.

She enjoyed this work so much and she wanted to complete all the 9 chains.  She even joined us late for dinner, since she wanted to complete this work!  The bead material is so expensive, but should I bite the bullet and get the long bead chains? Decisions... decisions...

Re-cap of our work week - May 7-14

How do you come up with really interesting titles for your posts ? I am running out of ideas!

Anyway, here are some glimpses of our Math work last week.  One new thing we started last week is for D to record what she works with, where applicable, in her Math notebook.  I got this notebook from India, this is kind of the standard Math notebook that elementary kids back home use.  It is nice, since you can write one digit in each square.  You can also use graph sheets with appropriate sized squares for this purpose.

As you can see we've been working on skip counting by 2s or figuring out the even numbers up to 30.  We used the RightStart Abacus initially to do this, since the bead chains only go up to 4 and 8.  Then we used this hundred chart to count and stamp by 2's, 5's and 10's using our dot markers.

After D was done counting by 2's, 5's and 10's she wanted to cross out all the odd numbers!

Other than this we also reviewed the types of Quadrilaterals and Triangles.  We also reviewed the value for different coins and played with coins to find out how to use different denominations to arrive at the same sum.

In Language, we've been working our way through Grammar and D sorted the different types of nouns.

I just wrote these out using silver marker on black construction paper

D drew and labelled "things" she found in our kitchen as part of finding out how things are named using nouns.

One day we did this while playing, basically D marking using the Montessori symbols the articles, adjectives and nouns.  Now I can't seem to find this one paper!

Since D hates handwriting worksheets, we are practicing good writing and punctuation by doing copy work.  D would never like or be interested in copying random stuff, so most of our writing relates to the work we've been doing that week.  D does 3-4 pages per week and I can already see a tremendous improvement in her handwriting!  Here is a sample.

D has been reading about butterflies, frogs and bean plants from various books that I borrowed from our local library.

We just started back on All About Spelling.  With the weather being so nice we haven't had much time to continue the lessons.  My goal is to do at least 2 lessons per week.  We are going to start from the beginning of Level 2 since we took a break earlier this year.

We tried some wet chalk drawing on black construction paper and D enjoyed it.

We focussed on Mexico last week. I basically pulled out all our Mexico stuff from the North America Box and let D explore and ask questions.

D is slowly by surely entering into the second plane of development!  Part of this is exciting, but part of this is also that she will not choose works that challenge her.  She would be happily peeling off and dressing up the different paper dolls she has in her continent boxes all through school time, without ever touching any other single work.  Now with a 2 year old distracting me, it is very easy for D to slip off into only doing whatever she wants and not any work that provides the next level of development.  So we tried something new this week.  I created a task list/work contract that D is responsible for finishing.  Nothing fancy, I just wrote whatever were the next logical step to whatever she was already doing.  Of course there are things on there that I need to help present or give directions, but the onus is on her to get her list checked off.

So far this has been working ok.  D likes the idea of checking off, so she knows exactly what she needs to do instead of just going into the school room and trying to choose what she wants.  Right now, she still needs to be reminded that there is a task list that she is responsible for, but we working towards it!

New Story by D

Here is the latest by D:

In case you cannot follow her writing, here is the Story:

The Earth - by D

Once upon a time a bad witch was making poison! and her cat was very bad to other people.  One day she killed Bheemun and she ate him.  Then she threw up.

- The End.

Here is conversation we had after I read her story:

Me: I like your story, good job! So, I see you have drawn the Earth, what is that round thing next to it and why didn't you color that?
D: That is the Moon so it is white Mom.
Me: Why did you draw the Earth and Moon with your story?
D: That is because the witch is on the Earth and this happened at night.
Me: Oh ok!

So after sometime she gets me this picture to add on to the story!

The Witch!

Story writing was not prompted by me, D did it by herself after we were done with school!  I had to help her with spelling a few words, but I love how she has a beginning, middle and end to her story!  This is definitely a result of giving the child the needed tools and surrounding her with a rich environment and setting her free to create what she wants!  

Our last couple of weeks

We've been enjoying the great weather and meeting friends these last few weeks.  We've been doing school only when the weather has been rainy.  Here are a few pictures from what we've been doing, I did not take pictures of a lot of stuff, so there aren't many photos.

Plenty of Art with Oil Pastels - Our new favourite medium!

We attended a local spring festival, watched shearing sheep and visited the pets.  Isn't this a cool photo?!

We've been revisiting a lot of our old Math Trays, trying to revise old concepts.  D is working on the Teens in the above picture.

I've always wanted to do some graphing and data analysis with D.  This activity was sparked by one of the recent "Sid the Science Kid" episodes.  We sorted a bunch of buttons by color, shape or no. of button holes and tried to analyze that.  We estimated minimum and maximums before graphing and it was fun to see if our predictions were right!

Sorted by Shape

Placed it the sorted groups on a graph.  Since this was an impromptu activity I improvised by drawing X-Y axis on a piece of Cardstock!

By Color

Sorted by no. of Button Holes and ready to be graphed.  We only had two and four holed buttons so this turned out not such a great idea!

We have been working on a bunch of grammar and been doing a lot of reading. We've also been exploring our continent boxes and doing some sensorial work.

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!