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.

I saw this.....

And then I saw this....... I knew it had to be bad. I cleaned some of it up before I took the picture. The phone rang, and the two year old had glue everywhere!

This is one of our new baby kittens. They don't even have their eyes open yet. This is the kind of "school" that I like. They learn sooo much from just observing nature.

This is Big A doing her phonogram booklets. Surprisingly, she enjoyed these! She worked on this for about 30 minutes and then decided to move to something else. They are very simple to make. You just make up a little booklet with 3 or four pages and write a phonogram on the outside. The child then has to think of words that have that phonogram in them and give a try at spelling it in the book. If they get it wrong, make a note of it and incorporate it in another lesson.

This is little A, doing her color matching cards from http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com I love this little store. We will be utilizing lots from her.

I got these wonderful manipulatives at Childcareland.com. They were quite challenging at first becasue she not only had to match the color, but the number of shapes as well. Visit my lovely links in the side bar to get these! They're free!

I got this idea from Chasing Cherrios! She called it "Muffin tin Monday". This was a big hit! I had chocolate rice cakes, carrot curls with raisins, mandarin oranges, nuts, and cheese and cracker. A ate her cheese before I could snap the picture. The idea behind this, at least for us, is that I make up these trays and put them on their montessori shelves and by the end of the day they have to have eaten everything in the cups. This way I know they are getting part of their daily 4.... or five of the food pyramid. How many are there now? I really wish they wouldn't change that stuff! I still haven't gotten used to the fact that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. My husband and I were discussing how to change the mneumonic, last night. What do you say?.... "My new machine just showed us nine....what" We finally decided to just say " Mynew machine just showed us ....nothing." Cheap machine. hee hee.

First "Official" day of montessori school!

No, this is not how we started out the day. This is nap time. The girls usually fight me on this one, but for some reason, when you go out and buy two 8 dollar plastic mats, and put them on a hard floor with their pillows, it becomes "fun"...not just a "nap"! go figure? Anyways, this is my favorite time of the day! heeheheee .... well, not really.....most days.

Montessori Activities

This is A showing of her nature collection! She found pinecones, pine needles, leaves , acorns and small pine and oak trees! We had just spent the morning reading about all of these!

Do you have a basement full of old baby food jars, just waiting to be used? We used 4 for color mixing. A used a dropper to then mix the primary colors and get secondary colors! She loves science!

This is A doing an activity from the library. We have an awesome resource room with lots of montessori materials. This box and all the wooden cards would normally cost me about $80! I get it free. I can only keep it a month, but she's usually bored with it by then, anyway

This is a preschool activity that I found online somewhere. I went to Lowes and got some of their FREE paint chips and then bought some of the mini clothespins in the craft section at Walmart. I colored a section of the clothespin to match the colors and A has to clip the clip to the card that it matches! So far she has learned, purple, orange, and yellow!

Well, now for pictures of our montessori adventure! I have gleaned sooooo much from other blogger's who post pics of their montessori activities! My 15 year old told me that I needed a blog so that I could document things and it not take so long! Thanks Ash! Anyways, here is my 1st grader, learning to use the smelling jars! The tray is a Melissa and Doug tray from something that we no longer use and the jars came from a little flea market up the street! They were actually part of a brandnew spice rack ( I gave $4) I filled 6 of the jars with herbs and the other six were their matches. She only missed one on the first try! Then, she wanted to do it again with me!

Children with cancer

I realize that this is not the happiest of topics to begin my blog with, but it is something that has pricked my heart severely in the last two weeks. I, personally, do not know anyone right now, that is battling cancer, but for the past two weeks, I have had a very tiny glimpse into what a parent might go through if they suspect their child has cancer. My 6 year old daughter suddenly developed a chain of lymph nodes up one side of her neck and they have remained painless and quite large for two weeks. ( indicators of Hodgkin's Lymphoma) After reading all the worst case scenarios online, we took her in to the doctor. Unfortunately he couldn't figure out what was wrong, but put her on antibiotics to see if it would help. She has had Lyme Disease twice this summer, so we weren't sure if it wasn't somehow related to this. I have been a basket case for the past two weeks. I have prayed continuously and on a few days, I could hardly function at all. I simply jsut wanted to hold my little girl, color with her, play with her and not let her out of my sight. The thought of my child developing cancer was absolutely heart wrenching. In the end, the antibiotic worked and more than likely she had a simple case of cat scratch disease from one of our cats. God is good and he is merciful. He is the Great Physcian. But, as I tried to move on and glory in the fact that my daughter was well and happy, I couldn't help but think of all those parents whose news was not good. I have prayed many times for these parents and these children whose lives are full of uncertainties, pain, and helplessness. I have no specific names to pray for, but God knows who they are and he will do what is best. Do you know someone who has cancer? Do you have cancer? If so, post your story. What have I learned from the past two weeks?....Life is short. We are not in control, God is. We are all appointed to death eventually. No matter our circumstance, sick or healthy, poor or wealthy, we all need God's forgiveness and we only get that through following and trusting in his son Jesus. Do you know him? Are you ready when your time comes? And lastly, I have learned that children are beautiful. They are gifts from God, each with an eternal purpose that only God knows. They should be wanted, loved, and respected as the God-given rewards that they are. ( Psalm 127:3).

Hello and Welcome to Pride and Joy Montessori

This is my attempt at starting a blog. I am a stay at home mom, who loves her kiddos and I needed a way to journal that would be easy. I love to take pictures so there will be plenty of those on the site. I also have the desire to help other SAHMs who are teaching their children at home and who are interested in the montessori style learning environment. I completed two years of college and as a part of those two years, I had the chance to observe at a montessori school. I have since rediscovered this style of learning and have decided to teach my 2 1/2 year old and 6 1/2 year old in this way. I will be posting pictures each day of our activities and I hope they will help and inspire you in your efforts as well.