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Here was a quick math activity for DD. The princess bookmarks were from here. It had been a while since LD did this place value activity, so I added this in to our other activities. I really like the purple paper beads which I printed out from here. I bound 10 sets of 100s with a brad to make a 1000 bead bunch. While we also have actual Montessori beads,...
LD read a book called “The Knight at Dawn” and decided he wanted to do some sort of knight-related craft. We built castles. I mostly did the big castles (with bits of help from the kids) while they used the scraps to build elaborate small castles (which unfortunately this photo totally obscures!) Dad used the castles as the entrance and exit of an elaborate 3-D maze. It became more and...
Yesterday, I introduced the song/rhythm: Bee Bee Bumble BeeCan you sing your name to me? It has the same rhythm as “Rain, Rain Go Away” We all tapped our paper to the rhythm, learned to play it on the glockenspiel and then played the bumble bee game while chanting the song. This morning, I was printing out rhythm sheets for next week’s class and thought I’d share this wonderful resource...
I’m going to have a class for a few homeschooling kids who are DD’s age (I do it for free–just for fellowship and music fun!). If anyone’s interested, I posted the general plan of what I will do for the first, 45-minute class. http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/p/music-class-for-five-year-olds-my.html The general theme will be music from around the world, but we’ll play lots of music-related games and learn a bit on the glockenspiel, etc. Tomorrow...
These past six weeks or so, LD has been doing a lot of work in his math workbook (that’s not terribly exciting to blog about, is it?!!). That was easiest for me while we were on travel and as we settled in. We generally use Right Start Math, but it is quite Mom-intensive, so we had to put that on the back burner for a while. In fact, we only...
We had so much fun with our huge dinosaur project. A teacher on a website I saw somewhere (sorry, I forget where) mentioned having her class make a “trash-o-saurus.” I thought that was a brilliant idea, especially as we have SO much packing paper from our move. We looked around the yard for some items to help us make the structure (bone system) of our dinosaur. The previous owners left...
Someone asked me a couple of days ago if I have any “girl time.” (And she obviously meant for *me*!) I don’t have too much in the way of outlets yet, but am getting a lot of pleasure out of working on the house and the yard. The moving in process is now going forward at glacial speeds (as the kids take up a lot of my time and energy...
We came across a wonderful idea here at U.C. Berkley: The Dinosaur Body to learn more about body structure and how dinosaurs had to be perfectly balanced to stand and move. I read the paragraphs about the importance of balance and had the kids balance a ruler on their fingers and then add a light head and a heavy head (the heavy head made the ruler tip over and you...
We looked up the length of several well-known dinosaurs, grabbed our plastic models and then went outside to see how long they really were. We chose stegosaurus 30 feet T-Rex 40 feet apatosaurus 90 feet We looked at how long one foot was (we hadn’t done measuring in feet before as we’ve used the metric system up until now) — and then measured out the dinosaurs’ lengths using a 20...
At the beginning of our activity we looked at this real fern fossil (from Pennsylvania). We talked about how ferns have been around for millions of years and fossil records indicate they were around well before dinosaurs (we referred back to the chart we have on “what came first” from a previous day.) Then we went into our woods and looked for different kinds of ferns for making our own...
In the past couple of weeks we read lots and lots of books about dinosaurs and have pulled out lots of different puzzles. LD got this for his birthday a couple of years ago and it was just perfect to pull out for this unit!
The Montessori teaching albums have an exercise called the “Clock of Eras.” I felt that would not work as well for our family as DD really doesn’t “get” the idea of a clock fully. I didn’t think it would really teach them the enormity of time as well as a long set of ribbons would… so instead I used the proportions of the clock and made a very long geologic...
For those of you who know much about Montessori, you’ll recognize “The Black Strip.” This is an impressionistic activity that is meant to impress kids with the enormity of time on earth. Our version was the purple ribbon strip — and it is only 21 feet (as my ribbon ream was 7 yards!). But it still shows how very little time we humans have been on earth. I’m showing you...
This week was really quite special. As I mention in the post below, LD and I had some wonderful talks about life, the miracles of life, the events that shape us, the paths we take along this amazing life of ours. Something almost as touching, was when I realized that we were here. We have come so far in these past four months and now we are once again a...
