School Days - Last 2 Weeks (2/11-19/15)

I have been super busy making card materials. I'm trying to finish up all the language folders as well. Take a peek at my "Free Downloads" page. I have created a tab for this under the blog header. I want to share what I can as I make stuff to hopefully save some headaches for others who are using Jessica's course or any AMI course for that matter.

Anyway, I'm back to give a quick update on what we've been working on. It's not much but you can still see what Montessori homeschooling looks like with a baby :). We did not have school on President's Day, Mardi Gras or Ash Wednesday :).

Here is what we've done:

Swiper pretty much just looking for trouble every few seconds.

I couldn't resist posting this one! He has a birthday coming up and I needed a good shot. Perfect! Crazy hair and all!

He was hiding behind the bead cabinet and kept popping back to see us.

Not sure what this is. He's leaning back as far as he can before falling over. 

Cat and MJ working on a dragon book together. Not totally school but I'll take it since there was some writing going on with it.

And this is what the floor looked like a few minutes into that session with Swiper poking around at stuff.

Like I said I've been making tons of card materials. I pulled out my old stash stored in a box from the days before I found Jessica's albums and we were sorely lacking! I need to redo some of the original ones I'd made because I didn't know they were supposed to be part of a complete 3 Part Cards set. I had only made picture cards. Plus my personality wants everything to be uniform, so I couldn't just whip up a batch of matching labels. I need ALL my card sets to be the same size and format, thank you very much :). So this is what I've been working on the past week and a half. You can find the ones I've finished on my Download page.

Here is Tes working with one of my old sets. We pulled out 4 sets and she sorted them by category. I think they were vegetables, clothes, church items and I forget what the other set was. Anyway, she knew most of the names of things except several in the church category. I realized that I need to explain better what is going on with these items when we go to Mass. These cards are part of the Social Classification sets. They basically help the child organize their world by allowing them to classify things in their minds. The cards are used for Vocabulary Enrichment so the child can express themselves better by knowing the names of the objects around them. Generally we teach the kids what things are called in everyday life, but I was surprised at a few things she didn't know the names of. I never thought to stop and make sure she knew what something was called. Shows how much I probably refer to things as "that thing right there" or "that (while pointing to it)". 

This one is for daddy to look at while he's at work :). Hi Daddy!

Here Cat and Tes are working on two different things while helping me out with Swiper. I think Tes was doing sound games but Swiper was trying to get the miniature objects. She was showing him the tiny My Little Pony brush. Cat was waiting on me to give her a number to make on the Large Bead Frame, so she was checking out a book that was next to her on the shelf. She's been coming along good with those numbers. At first she was having trouble creating numbers in the ten thousands and hundred thousands, but she seems to have gotten better and faster.

Swiper is definitely not ready for math yet.

Cat, Tes and MJ all having their turn at the bells. We always begin a presentation going up and then down the scale to train their ears. This presentation was a simple matching game. We took one set of bells to the table and they had to chose one from the shelf to match and then go find the match on the table.

MJ listening with his eyes closed. So then he realized that these bells have numbers engraved on them. Then he started covering his eyes so he wouldn't "cheat" by looking at the numbers. Stupid numbers! I was wondering how long it would be before the kids noticed. The girls only noticed after MJ said something out loud.

Tes checking out her match. She had a little trouble at first but eventually found the right bell. She had to go back and strike the bell on the shelf a couple of times. We will continue playing these games daily. The kids are really enjoying them. MJ has been playing songs on the bells and has now started playing songs on his keyboard as well. He's had that keyboard for several years now and has only really ever played the preprogrammed tunes or the funny sounds. I'm glad these bells have sparked an interest in making music. 

Here Tes was working with the Moveable Alphabet. She jumped from stage 1 to stage 3. Stage 1 is just forming single words. Stage 2 is forming small phrases or article/adjective/noun combos like "the pink tower" and such. Then stage 3 is forming sentences that leads to paragraphs. She pulled this work out and wanted to make sentence after we'd only done one session with multiple words a few weeks ago (I think when we started the blog up again). Anyway, the above picture says "Frisco watched a movie." Frisco is my grandma's dog. The kids love him. She always wants to use his name with this work.

Here, she wrote out "Ice Cube is cute." Ice Cube is her Ty blue penguin stuffed animal. She did pretty good but she was off with the phonetic spelling of "ice". I said "How do you make the sound 'I'" and she said "I know this is an "I" because I heard you say it before when you pulled the letter out". This is exactly why we don't teach the letter names. Instead of her using "ie" to make the long "i" sounds, she used just the single letter "i" because the NAME is the sound she needs.  Either way this is not a spelling lesson, which we will work on down the road, but it gives me a sense of what we need to work on with her sounds.

Cat has been continuing her fraction work. I presented equivalences with her. Here she is putting multiple pieces into the half section of the halves frame. She is finding equivalences of half.

This was fun. Tes has already done most of the work with the geometric shapes. After going over the album pages, I realized we hadn't ever played this game. She found an object from the environment that was the same shape as each of the geometric figures.

This was my favorite! Look at that, same color and everything! I was totally thinking that she would go digging through our miniature sound objects looking for a little egg that we have. I didn't think there was anything in the environment that had that same shape. I'm glad I'm not leading the teaching here...lol.

And a classic pose!

I didn't get a picture of it, but I worked with Tes on sorting some animal cards into the classes of vertebrates. We talked about their differences and then I pulled out these pictures. The kids spent the rest of class looking at each one on the window. They are pretty neat because one side has a picture of an animal (or human) and the back side has the skeleton. When you put it up to a bright light, you can see the skeleton through the picture. 

You can kind of make out the skeleton here.

I think Tes has it turned to the skeleton side here.

Today this was the only shot I got. MJ worked on a long multiplication problem. He still tends to write his numbers backwards so I gently remind him and he fixes them. When he showed me this problem that he made up, I said "So you have 4867 multiplied by 'POO.'" He was all too excited to tell his sisters what he'd done and we all had a good laugh for a few moments. We'll see if he remembers next time. 

Jenn