School Days - Wednesday (1/21/15)

Today's school time was short. Swiper was not cooperating and then I got completely sidetracked with trying to find something that I needed for a presentation I was in the middle of giving. Story of my life. I'd love to be prepared for all these presentations, but I can barely find the time to present just once, let alone practice presenting beforehand. Anyway, I got the point across. So here is a very SHORT look into our day:

Cat continued with the large bead frame. Today she worked on building numbers with it. We started with single digits and worked our way up each category adding them in as she "mastered" previous ones. She was able to go up to the 10,000 place. Tomorrow we'll try to get in 100,000s and 1,000,000s. I believe this is all she did today. She observed her brother sculpt some clay as well, but did not pull anything else out.

Tes did more work with the formation of numbers using the golden beads and the number cards. We worked 2 categories and 3 categories today. So I gave her number cards with 2 digits and she brought me the correct number of beads. Then I put the cards together and said the name of the number altogether. We also did this with 3 digits. She focuses very well with her work. Every time we finished a number she put all the beads back very slowly making sure they were setup just right. When Cat did this work about a year ago, she complained about having to put things back all. the. time. It is definitely noticeable that Tes has been a Montessori student right from the get go compared to the other two. Anyway, tomorrow we'll do 4 digits and hopefully move on to some operations next week. Tes has really impressed me with how well she is doing. She is not messing up one bit with these exercises. I need to get her going further along so she can be more challenged!

Swiper was up to his usual. Today was a bit rougher because we had the golden bead material out while he was awake. I usually try to pull it out when he goes down for a nap. He kept trying to crawl all over the number cards and beads. I was blocking them and he was crawling on top of me to get to them. He even went around all the tables (basically around the whole room) just to get to the other side where the beads are since we had it blocked off from the front. This picture is of him throwing his fit. Just thought I'd share so other Montessori homeschoolers with babies know they are not alone :). Poor baby. I shall never take another crying picture of him again :(.

All better and ready to move on to more destruction.

MJ worked with some clay today, but I didn't get a picture of it. He sculpted a cupcake...yum! I also presented to him more circle nomenclature. Today he learned about semi-circles, semi-circumferences, arcs, chords, segments and sectors. I seem to lack pictures from his presentations mostly because I present to him last since he seems most "normalized" at this point. He's been choosing work well on his own lately and has kept himself quite busy while I work with the girls. They seem to need more guidance right now so they cling to me and continuously ask for new presentations. I'll get some pictures of him tomorrow!

Jenn