Practical life

Here is an update of the practical learning activities that the children have been doing around the house lately. Hope enjoys doing a variety of Montessori tasks such as using tongs (though she often cheats and uses her fingers) to pass objects such as little plastic frogs from a container into the portions of an ice-cube tray.
In these pics she is transferring water from the left bowl to the right using a sponge. These activities are thought to get young children ready for the left to right process in learning to read. Then we played with the little frogs, counting them and making them jump from pool to pool.
Henry uses these base ten blocks which are fabulous for helping him understand loads of number concepts.
Here, we are about to follow a recipe for cheese stars from this jolly phonics book.


And I set up this pet shop to help the kids learn about adding up money and calculating change. This play till cost £10 and as well as calculating mentally, the children checked their answers using the till as preparation for future SATs tests that they sit in school - one of the papers is a calculator paper.
More uses for ice-cube trays! I've almost managed to sort out my homemade moveable alphabet. I just need one more for my vowel sounds.
We use this alphabet for word building. I am currently making a new set of tactile letters for Hope. I used to have a set of sandpaper one that I made years ago but they got ruined when the hot water tank leaked into our cupboard. As I don't much like the feel of sandpaper and find it quite tough to cut the letters out, I decided this time to use foam board and lighter foam to make these.

The website MontessoriMom.com has some great ideas and free resources.

Whizz, bang, pop!

Last week Honor-May bought a chemistry set. The kids have been dying to try it out. I think I said that as soon as she got it home she had it out in her bedroom and had pretty much mixed up the ingredients. So I promised I'd sort out a place to keep this stuff in the study and help them with the experiments. Well, I found myself a little challenged this morning to go through any serious lessons with them but allowed them to do their own kind of free play with a variety of ingredients from the kitchen. Hubby quickly pointed out that they'd be better doing this outdoors. I knew there was a good reason for putting up the gazebo - it makes an ideal science lab! So, here they are having a great time mixing up bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, lemon juice, gelatine crystals and food colouring! Meanwhile Hubby tried to get the microscope working. It's not ideal. In hindsight, we would have been better off investing in a decent microscope and then providing all the other bits and pieces separately. Not sure where you can get things like litmus paper cheaply and easily, though.

I'm looking through some websites now that have good ideas for home experiments that we can do next time. Here is one website I like:

http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/index.php

We recently got some new furniture for the study. Just some basic cabinets from Argos, but they suit the room rather well and provide essential storage for all my teaching bits n bobs and I even set aside one cupboard for the kids to keep some art n craft stuff in. The study is a very useful room for Hubby to go when he works from home and for the kids to get sent to when grown-ups need the living room to themselves! They usually moan that there is nothing to do in there. Now they have their own cupboard.

This morning, Grandma came round. Hubby had already sent the kids to 'the study', so we could talk in peace about serious, grown-up stuff. But they didn't mind at all. They turned up eventually having made these little lolly stick puppets.

Later on, I had to help Honor with her school homework. She has been studying shape and the assignment this week was to look at some pictures of models made with cubes and count how many cubes had been used. This was quite difficult for her to translate the diagram to real -life in her head so we used the baby's blocks to rebuild the models and then count.

I think she'll need a lot more practise doing this for real before she'll be able to do it just by looking at a picture.

This afternoon I took her out to get her prize for moving up a level with her Kumon. She chose a chemistry set... no doubt inspired by the fun she had during yesterday's science day.

We went to church this evening and the children did the offertory procession beautifully, this time! No fighting or running!!!
When we got home and I went to put Honor to bed, I found she had all the stuff from her chemistry set out and mixed up already. It would have been cheaper just to provide containers of stuff like bicarbonate of soda and vinegar and just let her experiment. If hubby will let me, I think I'll set something like up for them in the study.

Cooking Day.

Yesterday was cooking day. Henry had already finished his Kumon before school so he got to go first. To help him practise his reading, I wrote out some simple instructions from the recipe book for him to read as we went along, like this:

With very young children I like to change the colour of the letters to highlight the different phonemes. (ie: or, th and sh) I think it helps them identify them a bit more easily.

So here is Henry making raspberry muffins.

Honor's focus was.... maths!!!! So here she had to practise accurate measuring.

She made a sardine dip by blending a small can of sardines with 3 fl oz of plain yogurt, a few sprigs of coriander, a little squeeze of lemon juice and pinch of black pepper. Then she cut some cucumber, celery and red pepper sticks for dipping.

And served them with some japanese rice crackers. She loved this. Henry wasn't so keen on the sardine dip, so she ate his too. I managed to have a little bit myself but had to fight her for it!

Then we watched Little House on the Prairie.