We didn’t do as much this week but Friday in particular was a day for working on his Montessori activities. DJ has had a flower arranging activity on his shelves for awhile but doesn’t usually select it. That tray had artificial flowers, already cut to length to fit in the vase. Our neighbor gave us a bouquet of peonies. It was the perfect opportunity to teach DJ how to cut flower stems with scissors and he loved it! Without Montessori philosophy, I would never have thought to give scissors to a 2 year old, let alone have him arrange flowers. But he is truly thriving with the challenge.

DJ worked with his stringing beads again. I have a love-hate relationship with these. I love how much he enjoys working with them and the fine motor skills they encourage. I hate how he’s driven to spread them all over the living room if I don’t watch closely! He also worked with his Ryan’s Room Sew ‘n Sew. Threading it is fairly easy but the real challenge is un-threading it to do it again. In this picture, he’s working on un-doing the threading with my direction. “Follow the thread to the hole, find the other side of the hole, pull the thread through, repeat”.

I didn’t get a picture of it, but DJ worked briefly with the Sandpaper Globe again. This time he was mostly interested in the mechanics of the pin that connects the globe to the wood base. He took it apart and put it back together several times before putting it back on the shelf.

Next, he wanted me to work with him, so we brought out the Pink Tower and Brown Stair together. The Pink Tower is easy for DJ and he built it happily. You can see him proudly placing the smallest cube on top. The Brown Stair is still very difficult for him, so I presented it again, showing him which rectangular prism to select in order to build it correctly from thickest to thinnest. Then we explored the two works together. They are related because each cube of the tower has the same dimensions as the square end of the corresponding brown prisms. When he is ready, there are a lot of extensions to build these two items together but for now I just let him try to match each cube/prism pair.

And then he chose the Cylinder Blocks and corresponding Knobless Cylinders again. This time I limited him to only two blocks and it was much easier for him to put them away without getting overwhelmed.

We’ve been working on this concept a lot – the full work cycle is to select a work from the shelf, work with it and then return it to the shelf. It’s a very important life skill that I have never completely mastered myself, so I’m thrilled to have the encouragement to expect DJ to learn it at an early age.

Later that evening he pulled out some paper and markers to do some doodling. I’m happy to see this because after months of nonstop drawing, he just stopped for what seemed a long time. It’s good to see him enjoying it again.

The next evening, DJ selected this “game” from the language shelves. I bought these cards at a homeschool curriculum consignment store for $5. There are 30 pairs in the box, but I’ve only provided 7 pairs on the shelf. Each pair has pictures of opposites on it. You can see to his left there are three pairs already matched, the top two being cars. That’s his favorite pair! One car is new, clean and shiny while the other is old, dirty and broken. This set of cards has really expanded his vocabulary for descriptive words, empty/full, day/night, open/closed, etc.