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Month: August 2014

New Lacing Cards and a lot of activity

New Lacing Cards and a lot of activity

DJ received these new-to-us Lacing Cards this week. I bought them secondhand for $10 and they’re great. They are 9×12 heavy cardboard with adorable pictures of various tools. Perfect for a little guy. He’s selected them several times already. In addition to being fun, it is great for fine motor dexterity of his hands. Pulling the thread through the hole requires the same 3-finger grasp of a proper pencil grip for writing. It also helps to teach order and sequence…

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Asleep in a Chair

Asleep in a Chair

After a few weeks of ignoring these opposite cards, DJ selected them out of the blue one evening. We laid out half the cards (30 sets total) and I pulled one card at a time from the other stack. Then DJ found the matching (opposite) card. In this photo, I have a long rope and he’s looking for a short rope. He actually did about half of the matches before losing interest. How did I know he had lost interest?…

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A Little of This and a Little of That

A Little of This and a Little of That

It’s been slow in terms of Montessori work lately. The summer has been busy with swimming, bicycling, trips, spending time with grandparents and potty training so there hasn’t been as much interest in the Montessori shelves. But there has been a little. These Smelling Bottles are new on the shelf. The bottles are glass spice bottles that I emptied. I put red stickers on half and yellow stickers on the other half. The bottles are filled with cotton balls that…

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Land & Water Forms

Land & Water Forms

Continuing our introduction to geography, DJ had his first presentation of the land & water forms this week. This material is used to teach the various shapes of land and water found around the world in corresponding pairs such as island/lake, peninsula/gulf, straight/isthmus, etc. While this is a very common early geography lesson, it has particular relevance to the region we live in, which is rich with lakes, islands, peninsulas, straights and a sound (which is similar to a gulf…

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