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…
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…
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?…
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…