Growing up......

This is my baby.... sigh...... So grown up looking. Where does the time go?

Fairies...

Have you ever wished for one of those cleaning fairies to pay you a visit? Well, I have! when I came down stairs to cook dinner, I found two of them in my pantry! The six year old thrives on order and structure. She told me that it needed cleaning out and organizing and that she and her sister were gonna do it!

Thank you A!

More Montessori Activities

Science ExperiThis was the coolest experiment we've done all year! Here's what you need: baking soda, dropper, small bowl of white vinegar, shallow tray and a piece of white paper.

First, you sprinkle the four primary colors of drink mix on a tray.

Then, you cover it with a light layer of baking soda...

Then, have the child suck up some of the vinegar in the dropper and slowly drip drops of it onto the tray.



AMAZING! This was soooo fun to watch!


Then, she got a piece of paper and layed it over the top of the fizzing bubbles....her smile was worth it all! Sheer happiness!






SPACE!.......

Well, this is the product of the picture below. I still haven't figured out how to to get the pictures up here in the order I want, so this post may not make sense, but hopefully it'll spark some creativty for ya! LOL As you will see furthur down, we have been studying the planets. We also talked about how the astronaunts eat and drink in space. Tang has too much sugar, so we opted for the whole foods approach.

This is 2 year old little A juicing oranges! Who knew it could be so fun!


The snack for the day was "Moon Cheese" complete with craters and asteroid crackers.

Here, we used a medicine dropper base and several layers of clay to discuss what core sampling is and how they use this to find out what is in the center of the earth.

These are awesome little K-2 grade readers that I got from the library. They have just enough information and not a lot of technical facts that can give a 1st grader, brain fog.

This is a new activity that I came up with to help my 6 year old learn the difference between odd and even. You need, a pair of dice, a paper with odd and even printed at the top, a little spoonful of Nutella or other dip, and a bowl of mixed nuts.

Have the child roll the die or dice and guess at whether the number rolled is odd or even, then...

have them take out that many nuts and test their answer. Have them divide the nuts evenly between the two of you. If they are even then the child writes the number in the even column, if the number is odd, it goes in the odd column. Then, you can dip your nuts in the nutella and eat them!

Can you say frustrated? She insisted on dumping all the wooden color cards out of the montessori sorting box and then when I asked her to pick a certain color she got overwhelmed and this is what we got. Needless to say, I put all but about 3 different colors out on the mat and that helped. It's very important to minimize the frustration a child may feel when presented with a task, especially a new one.

If you're squeamish in the least, you might wanna skip this post. The above picture, ended up being our science lesson the other day. It's a dung beetle as best as I could tell. My 6 year old discovered it while watching our chickens. She kept coming to the garden and telling me that the dirt and sticks by the chicken coop, were moving all by themselves. Upon further investigation we discovered these little critters and her and her sister watched them for about 30 minutes. She refused to draw them in her nature journal though. Little A kept yelling, " Doog Beevils!"

This is my 11 year old below. I found her down by the basement door with this.....It may only look like a piece of purple cloth, but ....

she dyed it herself....

with squished blackberries. When stuff like this starts appearing around the house, I know she's been reading again. She and her older sister were born in the wrong time period. They would proabably be much happier in say..... the 17 or 1800s! Oohhh the pictures I could post.

Montessori's mortar and pestle idea, what else can I say? My 2 year old loves it, my 6 year old loves! Little A prepared the snack for the day. She crushed the vanilla wafers in the bowl...

peeled the banana...

cut the banana (in odd shaped chunks, I might add...

dipped the banana pieces in the crumbs...

stuck in a frilly toothpick...

and did it all with a smile! Move over Rachel Ray! Who'd have thought something so simple would ticle a child so much? They were quite tasty, too!

This is Big A doing her magnetic or non magnetic activity and no, she is not attached to a wall by her rear end. That's just the angle that the picture was taken. I used my canning lid magnetic wand and just made two columns on a piece of paper and she tested each object in the bowl and deposited them in the proper category.

This was lots of fun for little A. I bought a $4 box of pink plastic jewels of different shapes and sizes, from Walmart and a pair of tongs. It took her a few minutes to figure out how to hold them, but she finaaly figured out what worked best. She transferred all the jewels to the jars and then realized that the big ones took up too much space, so she dumped them out, replaced the smaller ones and then looked at me. I asked her if there was somewhere else she could put big ones that were left and she scanned the room and brought back a little cup. She quickly filled it and then smiled at me with approval! It's amazing how much learning can take place with such simple activities. With this one activity, she worked on gross motor skills, problem solving, reasoning and spatial concepts.

This is my cheap solution to the montessori "Pink Tower" toy. Walmart sells these for 8 bucks. The kid put the tower up, on the first try! Saved myself $17 and she mastered that skill in a day

The 6 year old got the paper version of the pink tower and she, too, got it right, the first time.
Sometime homemade is just .....better. Not to mention, less expensive. The two hundred dollars I spent on Montessori Materials was spent on math and language stuff. I think I'll be happy. I got these from the http://montessoriprintshop.com $4. I just printed and laminated them.