Bead Material, Extra Fun, Language, Make It Yourself, Math, Sensorial

Back to Work

So, after a season of traveling…we’re back at home and getting into the swing of things and having a great time. I’m pretty relaxed about this homeschooling thing, which makes me sort of nervous as it seems almost too easy. Do any other homeschool parents feel this way? Maybe I’m shamming :) .

The kids work on sensorial and practical life stuff just about every day. Here my oldest is working with graded sand tables and my youngest is working with a shoe button dressing frame. I still can’t get over how fast my oldest learned how to tie his shoes and he virtually taught himself by playing with the bow tying dressing frame a few times. My youngest loves the cylinder blocks. In particular he enjoys placing the knobless cylinders into the knobbed cylinder blocks. I bought the knobbed cylinders second hand but they are Neinhuis and are quite well made. I bought the knobless cylinders from kid advance for like 46 bucks and they are made pretty good too, especially for the price.

These objects are from the alphabet box. I made word cards to match with each object. He can’t read all these words just yet, however his command of the alphabet sounds allows him to decipher which cards match which objects.The kids cut real vegetables and fruits and pour juice and milk frequently, but I can’t help it, play food is so fun! The velcro chopping sets are especially cool and are without the risk of cuts, which allows for more spontaneous and less supervised play. The Melissa and Doug Food playsets are my favorite because they are well priced and quite good lookin’.As shown above, I finally got around to making an alphabet object box. This is one of the more simple but fun things to put together. I plan to switch out the objects once a week. Since I purchased object sets Montessori Services and Lakeshore, I have a lot of objects. I’d say at least eight for each letter. I also have objects for digraphs. There is only one object in each drawer at a time. The kids really like this for some reason.Here my oldest is working with a basket of objects that rhyme. This was another simple activity to put together and I can change the objects out frequently. I also have cards for the same purpose that I printed out from ABC Teach.I laid these number cards out for him on felt mats. He used the golden bead material to make the amounts.I finally figured out how to play the addition snake game. This is super awesome. I used the tutorial from Infomontessori.com to teach it to my oldest.When we went to Disneyland Paris, we found a bucket of toy soldiers. We use them as counters. In the photo above my oldest is using the soldiers to complete an addition worksheet. I’ve noticed that he does some of the simpler math problems in his head, which is pretty cool. He mostly uses the soldiers when adding larger numbers.Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles. I love this chunky dinosaur puzzle from Melissa and Doug. We can talk about the colors of the dinosaurs, talk about which dinosaurs are larger or smaller, and also identify some of the dinosaurs names.

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