Because we were away for vacation most of last week I had expected I wouldn’t have any Montessori activities to write about. But Friday afternoon, DJ surprised me with a whirlwind of work, including more work with the Brown Stair than any other time since he first received it.

He started out by taking the Brown Stair off the shelf and building it in order one prism at a time. This is significant because he’s mostly insisted on keeping it out of order in the past. As seen in this photo, he even used the thinnest prism to show the “proof” that each step was the same size, thereby verifying they were in the proper order.

After he completed the test for proper order, I removed one of the pieces and then closed the gap. I handed him the removed piece and asked him to put it back in place. He was SO close to finding the right space, but you can see in the photo that he’s just one off.

Next he decided to build the Brown Stair vertically. When he finished, I suggested he build the Pink Tower next to it.

Once he had the Pink Tower built he was really pleased with himself. Here he is smiling at his dad. I almost wonder if he was showing off for dad, because he’s not usually home when we’re working.

Next, I found a photo of an extension on the Internet. I showed it to DJ and had placed the first three blocks when DJ insisted on taking over himself. He finished the pattern without hardly a pause.

This pattern was fun although I had to hold the largest Pink Tower cube with my foot to keep the whole thing from sliding. But DJ really enjoyed building it and was so proud of himself when it was finished.

Next he moved on to the Geometric Cabinet and selected the drawer of rectangles.

And then the circles drawer

And the demonstration tray. I tried to tell him the triangle was an equilateral triangle but he insisted I was wrong. “It’s not a equilateral triangle, it’s just a triangle!” Hah. It was really cute how he pronounced equilateral though.

Finally he chose a drawer from the Botany Cabinet and matched several of the shapes to the cards. I need to remove some of the shapes from the cabinet though. There are only supposed to be 18 but my cabinet has extra, a total of 24. Unfortunately my control sheet with the names only has 18 so DJ keeps asking me “what’s this” and for many of them I can’t answer.

Then he moved on to these 4-sequence cards from the language shelf. I was so impressed with his ability to order these. We’ve mostly only worked with the 3-sequence cards so he’s not as familiar with these. But with guided questions from me he was able to place several stories in order. This photo shows a girl building a block tower. DJ has selected the first card and moved it to the top and is looking for the second card.

Finally, he selected this 2D-3D matching activity. He’s worked with this before but this was the first time that he placed all of the animals on their images. Usually he gets distracted and wanders off before finishing but he was on a roll this day and his focus was incredible.