The Arctic

Wrapping up Winter we recently studied the Arctic.  

Here are some of the activities, projects and works we did:  

 

Winter exploration work on the wall with winter images.

Spooning/Scooping "snowballs".

Two works that are always present in my bi-weekly topics (animal habitats) are the felt story board with felt animals from the appropriate biome and the biome table which houses a mock habitat (3d or pictorial  sometimes with real plants, dirt, sand, water, etc.) and small plastic animals which the child can interact with. This habitat is blue foam for a lake and a water hole (the killer whale is on top of it here) and a combination of batting and cotton balls all hot glued onto on old, stained art tray.

Arctic Habitat and animals.

And even though I could not have a frozen arctic tundra for the little animals to live on I wanted to bring in some snow and ice from outside for the students to interact with.  We talked about the arctic people and animals and then got to play with snow, the whole time I talked about how it is cold and wet and what the people and animals of the arctic adapt to this.

Our hallway art for the unit:

Aurora Borealis with igloo and penguins (we talked about both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis)-  water colored sky glued onto white paper.  Then we colored the penguins and glued them and the igloos onto the snowy white ground.  Polar bear paintings- we started with BLUE polar bears....polar bears are NOT BLUE.  So we HAD to paint them WHITE.  This was a really fun and goofy art project.

That about wraps it up, next up is grasslands and Springtime (although as I look out the window this day after Spring officially began it is snowing...).

Happy Snow

We are quite happy with the two snow days this week.  Here's my Montessori toddler playing with a dustpan and broom in the snow:

  

                                                                        (snow angel)

I hope all of you are staying warm and safe in the winter weather!

Montessori in the News (Kind of)

This past week Montessori got attention, but only to those who know about Montessori.  The president visited a school in Decatur,Georgia as part of his plan to expand the nation's preschool programs.  Though, College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center does not project itself as a Montessori school it clearly contains Montessori materials.  Here's to president Obama seeing and interacting with Montessori materials! (Makes me want to invite him to my school):

These children, along with president Obama, are working with the pink tower and the broad stair.  These materials belong to a family of Montessori materials called sensorial materials.  Sensorial materials are used to help the child concentrate on and refine his sensory skills so that he can make classifications within his environment.  The materials were designed to isolate the one quality that the child is to focus on.

Pictured above are the broad stair and pink tower in their standard configurations, once the child has mastered this he is allowed to expand upon these configurations with guides that the teacher provides, eventually combining both works, and then designing configurations of his own.

 

 

Toddlers can easily work with a half set of the pink tower and broad stair, i.e. every other one, five total.  They can also do extensions and combinations with guides.

Her first solo pink tower completion.

 

 

I usually let them/have them work together for the combination extensions where the pink tower and broad stair are used together.  There are a lot of materials involved and the toddler brain has a tendency to overload and shut down when things are too many in number and overwhelming   Also, it lets them learn how to share and collaborate towards a common goal.  All Montessori toddler programs should include these fundamental sensorial materials in their curriculum!

Yoga

 Yoga with toddlers!

So I know that doing yoga with your toddler is not a new idea by any means...but it is valuable even if you're not really into yoga.  I was having so much fun doing yoga with my daughter the other day, and was so impressed by some of her poses that I felt the need to write about it.

Kids love Yoga because it lets them be goofy and physical.  Also, often they're better than you are at many of the poses (which they get a kick out of).  It's exercise which is great and you can do some silly bonding.

 

These flash cards are pretty great because it gives us the opportunity to do yoga and talk about abc's/phonics. They're "The ABCs of Yoga for Kids Learning Cards" by Teresa Anne Power,(link to amazon.com if you're interested).  I focus on the letter of the week both at home and in my classroom with the yoga flashcards.  In my classroom I laminate color copies of the cards and put them in a basket on the shelf along with a pint-sized yoga mat.  The children get the work out and practice their yoga.  With older children they can take off their shoes while doing this (an extra special addition).

 But you don't have to limit yourself to yoga to combine physical activities with learning.  You can roll a ball or throw a ball back and forth.  While doing so you can count (I've found that kindergarten and older kids LOVE playing catch and counting up to 100+ each time the ball is caught). You can also say the ABC's with each letter with each roll or, for older kids an object, food, animal, etc for each letter (Alligator, Baboon, Cat...) in the order of the alphabet.  These activities are nice because you can do them indoors and still get some large muscle/exercise in.  Remember dancing! Dancing while holding, lifting, etc. your child is great exercize for you too.  Try to get them exercise during the Winter months when they're unable to go outside because of weather.

More Montessori at Home

My daughter got some ABC and Numbers puzzle that are slightly bigger than her age when all put together at a single set.  So, I bagged them up into zip locks and labeled them. I divided the ABC puzzle into six sets according to the Montessori language divisions; SMAT, BFOX, HUCP, NERD, WIJGL, KQVYZ.

 I divided the numbers into 5 piece sets; 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20 since she is getting really good at 1-4 and should be up to 5 soon.

 I like buying materials just a little bit out of her grasp and the pairing them down like this. 1. It pushes her and 2. It saves money because I can use them longer. I also got these three wooden puzzles on sale, I think individually that they might be easy for her so I put them into one container together.  I used a Montessori trick- "control of error"- to help her discern which pieces fit to which puzzle.  I put all dragon fly stickers on the dinosaur puzzle, all heart sticker on the duck puzzle, and all animal stickers on the lion puzzle.

I know that these tricks are not belonging to Montessori alone but they are valuable, you can use anything that you find and make it fit your child/children's abilities. Happy teaching! 

Fancy Stick

Check out this great project I did with my daughter today!  Mercury has a thing for sticks and picked another one up the other day while we were outside so we thought we'd dress it up a little.

 

 

We got out a bunch of random beads/buttons, paint pens, ribbon scraps, snippets of old colorful drinking straws, scrap puzzle pieces and googly eyes.  She told me what she wanted and where, while I manned the hot glue gun.  We counted how many beads in a line or a grouping while we made it.  You could also do ABC beads to talk about letters or talk about colors or patterns.  Naturally her stick has been a magic wand, a sword, has become a creature and much more.

You could do this with an older child (I'll probably do this for Mercury tomorrow) and create a story with the stick as the main character.  Or a story where the child is a pirate and this is his/her sword, etc.  The child can draw their stick or take a picture of it and insert it into different backgrounds. I like how this project had us really working together to transform the stick into something new.  We also used a lot of ribbon scraps and other stuff that helped de-clutter.

One of my favorite projects is an idea I found in a book back in high school for my K-5 summer program is creating a Pirate Utopia.  This can last one week or all semester.  The children create their own society complete with things like: Name, Flag, National Animal, Gross National Product, Political Map, Topography, Customs, Native Art....and on...and on. I can see turning the stick into something like that.  Check back for the Fancy Stick Book, coming soon.

Seasonal Fun!

Here's some fun seasonal stuff we've done in the fall and winter. Sensory and Science activities and just bringing Fall and Winter objects into the normal shelf work.

Pumpkin Carving:

Washing our pumpkin.

Taking out the insides. Sorting seeds so we could bake them.

We talked about how pumpkins grow and had a work on the shelf with cards showing the different stages from seed to pumpkin.  When we were done carving our Jack-o-Lantern the sequence cards and some dried seeds were kept on the little table with it.

We turned off the lights and let it glow after they watched me carve it.

For the design I printed off a few choices and we voted, they wanted the standard face.

Cornucopia:

Snow and Ice:

 We found a nice big sheet of ice that quickly became lots of pieces.

It's transparent, how cool!

We brought the snow inside when it was too cold to go out.

Holiday themed works:

Decorating the tree on our felt board.

Glueing ornaments on a tree.  This is a work that is regularly on the shelf, not a special project.

Decorating a tree.

 

Toy train (fine motor skills).  They're going to be sooo upset when this isn't there in January. \