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.