Hannah with the movable alphabet

Hannah worked on pink set 1 this week with the movable alphabet for the first time. She has been asking for a while to do this activity as she sees Aliyah doing it but I thought she wasn't really ready. I eventually gave in and thought we'd do it together but she amazed me, she could identify all the sounds in the words without a problem and just needed a bit of help finding the letters in the box. I had been thinking about the Pink, Green, Blue versus Dwyer approach and came to the conclusion that Dwyer seems the better approach for a home ed set up. However, if I was going to follow that route Hannah wouldn't be able to work with the movable alphabet for probably another 1 or 2 years. She was so happy to do this today it would be a shame to miss out on this enthusiasm so I'm glad I do have the P, G, B boxes and I'll just try to 'follow the child' and let her work with it whenever she wants. 

Livvy is get more mobile and found her way off the mat to have a look at the nature table today!

 Aliyah worked with the coloured bead stairs today to see how many ways ten can be made. She enjoyed this and did it twice and then asked if she could write them all down.

Maths and Letter Sounds

This week Aliyah has been choosing mainly maths activities. I do sometimes worry that some of the equipment we buy isn't getting used as often as I would like but the the bead bank and number cards are used over and over again. These materials are really helping Aliyah understand large numbers and their quantities.

 We have been doing addition for a while and this week we started multiplication ...

and subtraction. So far only subtraction without change but hopefully next week subtraction with change.

Hannah is definitely in a sensitive period for letter sounds at the minute. She is always trying to segment and blend sounds and does lots of pretend reading and even some real reading from very easy readers such as Bob books. Here she has matched all the movable alphabet letters to the sandpaper letters. This took quite a long time but she stuck with it. She has some difficulty recognising the cursive letters which don't resemble the print versions. I know that officially the Montessori method would introduce reading much later but she is so interested that I feel it would be a shame not to follow that interest.

Here they are together doing the 'letter race' game. Thank you to http://trilliummontessori.org/trillium-blog/ for this idea.

Just an extra picture. We found this lovely natural corner at our local Sure Start centre. Will be keeping a look out for some of these items.

Getting into the Swing

We're starting to settle down now and get into a bit more of a routine. We managed to do quite a few sessions of Montessori this week and even did a morning and afternoon on Wednesday. First time ever to do a full day and it went surprisingly well, though we were all quite tired afterwards.

Hannah is really into shapes at the minute. This is one of her favourites. It looks easy but she has struggled for a long time to be able to get all the pieces back in so she is very pleased with herself now that she can do it all on her own. 

Another shapes activity, here she is just making up pictures using the shapes. We're struggling to find a more structured way to use this material.

Because she seemed so interested in shapes I got the mini constructive triangles out. We've only done the first box so far but she likes it a lot and it seems just at the right level for her.

She is also enjoying some 'scarecrow' activities - number cards to use with the bead stair and a matching activity. I downloaded these from one of  my favourite blogs - http://www.trilliummontessori.org/trillium-blog

Finally Aliyah is showing some interest in writing in cursive. She had been doing some work with the green boxes and the moveable alphabet and then choose this practice sheet to fill in.

Aliyah was very excited to get to use the metal fractions as this activity is usually used by the 'big girl' It madin our co-op. It her feel very grown up but she did struggle when she got to the 9ths and 10ths. They do look very similar! She wanted to go on to labelling them but she really isn't quite ready for that.

She has done some adding before with the number rods. This time she was using the short bead bank. First she did a sheet of questions with answers up to 10 and then in the afternoon she asked to do some with answers in the teens.