My Montessori Journey

Oviparous and Viviparous Animals

We have been studying and learning about oviparous and viviparous animals.  This is a really fun topic to teach young children about.  My favorite book for introducing this topic is called Chicken's Aren't the Only Ones by Ruth Heller.  This book is great for showing that many animals other than chickens come from eggs and are oviparous.

 

A great follow-up book that we've read is called Animals Born Alive and Well, also by Ruth Heller.  This book discusses mammals and their characteristics and introduces the word "viviparous", meaning animals who give birth to live young.

 

I came up with a cut and paste activity to support our study of this topic.  Below you can see how I've set it up on the shelf.  The children do this activity at the two tables facing the shelf, so they don't have to carry the materials anywhere.  They just sit down and grab what they need.

 

From left to right I have a tray with the Oviparous/Viviparous sorting page and a tray with the animal pictures..........

 

......then a basket with glue, a bowl with scissors, a jar with a pencil for writing their name on the work, and a tray with vinyl gluing mats.

 

To do this work, the child cuts apart the animal pictures and lays them out in the appropriate column: oviparous or viviparous.  Then they have a teacher check their work.  Once their work is checked, they can glue the pictures onto their paper.

 

 

You are welcome to download and use my sorting page and pictures using the files below.

Download Oviparous Viviparous Sorting page

Download Oviparous viviparous animals for sorting

Draw a Chick activity

In January I put out a Draw A Penguin activity on the art shelf and was really surprised and impressed with how well the children did with it.  Basically, I made a flip book showing the different steps to drawing a penguin.   Recently we have been studying oviparous animals (those that hatch from eggs), so I decided to set up a Draw a Chick activity.  Below you can see how I arranged it in a basket.  There is a laminated flip book showing the different steps to drawing a chick, a stack of white construction paper squares for drawing, and a little basket with a pencil and the three markers needed for this project.

 

To do this work, the child takes out the flip book and a blank piece of paper.  They write their name on the back of the paper.  Then they use the markers to draw each step as they flip from page to page.  The first photo below shows the first page of the flip book and the second one shows the last page.

 

 

The next photo shows two chicks that were drawn today by two different students.  One student is 4 and one is 5.  Aren't they cute??

Flower Sort and Count

A new sorting and counting activity has been a popular spring addition to my Practical Life shelves.  I found the tray shown below at Dollar General.  It would be so cute to use for spring and summer entertaining (however, I DON'T entertain!).

 

I added these little ice cream cups (also from Dollar General)..........

  

And a little basket of flower shaped ice cubes (also from....you guessed it.......Dollar General).

 

I placed all of the above on a tray with a little basket of number cards and a pair of tongs.

 

To do the activity, the child uses the tongs to sort the flowers by color into the matching bowls.  Then they count how many of each color and add the appropriate number card.  The final step is to have a teacher check their work.  I have had many variations of this work out during the year and it's always very popular among both the younger and older students.

 

Hair's what else is new: Part 2

Here is Part 2 of the new Practical Life activities I made using hair accessories from the dollar store.  As I was writing this post I realized that I have used hair accessories before to make a new activity and it was actually that activity which inspired this new one.  Back in December I had the children stretch red, green and white hair scrunchies over a jar.  At the time I didn't know if they would even like doing the activity.........it was a total experiment.  It turns out they really liked it.  You can see the post about it here.

Okay, so when I saw the teeny scrunchies at the dollar store, I remembered that I had some extra wooden rolling pins that one of the grandpas of one of my students had made for us to use with playdough (Thanks, Lyle M!).  And I thought back to my December scrunchie-on-a-jar activity and came up with this.  I color-coded the dowels by coloring the ends with magic marker.  Then I put them in a basket on the tray with the scrunchies in another container.  There are 10 scrunchies of each color.

 

Here's a close-up of the colored ends of the dowels.

 

And here you can see what it looks like when the scrunchies are stretched onto the dowel.  This is a great fine-motor activity that uses both hands.  It is great for children who haven't yet determined handedness as it requires them to decide that one hand will be the "helper" and one will be the dominant hand for stretching the scrunchies.  It also works the finger muscles which is great preparation for writing.

Hair's what else is new: Part 1

Yes, the spelling of the title is very intentional.  And I'll tell you why.  This past weekend as I was trying to come up with some new activities for the classroom I stopped at Family Dollar which is one of two dollar stores in my town.  Usually I prefer Dollar General and find more things there, but I do like to shop at Family Dollar once in a while.  This time I was just kind of hanging around and I happened to spy the hair accessories.  Let me state right up front that there are few (if any!) hair accessories in my home.  My hair is too short to accessorize and I have two sons.  So there you go.  However, I never know where inspiration will hit and when I saw some spring colored hair things I immediately thought of a few activities to make with them.  I quickly snatched up a bag of barrettes, headbands, and tiny scrunchies.  I took them back to school and put them together to make two new Practical Life activities.  I will show you one today and one tomorrow.

Below you can see the activity as I set it up on the tray.  I needed a very LARGE tray for this one since I used two of the great serving dishes I bought at Dollar General.  In the bowl there are 4 hair scrunchies and 4 each of 4 colors of flower barrettes.  Both the scrunchies and barrettes had more than 4 colors, but my cute tray only has 4 sections, so that was a no-brainer!

 

To do this work, the child first sorts the barrettes by color as shown below.

 

Then they snap the barrettes of one color onto the matching headband.  This part of the activity stretches their concentration and fine motor skills.  Pardon my smudgy hands in the photo.  They were smudged from making the Draw-a-Chick activity which will be shown in a FUTURE post.

 

And here you can see the pink headband with the pink barrettes snapped on.  Once the child has snapped on and matched all the barrettes, they remove all the barrettes and return them and the headbands to the bowl.  Unsnapping the barrettes requires quite a bit of finger strength which is great for those little muscles to get them ready for writing.

 

NOTE:  I haven't posted for a few days because we have been having a rough time at our house this week.  You can read about it here if you are interested.

Wee Little Water Pouring

This little water pouring work it TOO cute!  I found the teeny pitcher at my favorite local thrift store (of course!).  I bought it at the same time I bought my Mr. Moon pitcher and they were both half off!  I had to try several containers before I found one small enough to pair with this little pitcher.  I can't imagine what it was originally intended for.  If anyone knows, please leave a comment.  I'm so curious.  Anyway, I think my little ones will LOVE this itty bitty pouring work.  The little tray it's on is only about 6 inches long.

 

I took this photo to show perspective.  You can see how small it really is compared to my adult sized hand.  It's no more than about 1 1/2 inches tall.

 

I wrote this post on Sunday and, unfortunately, the little pitcher was dropped yesterday by a student and had to be tossed.  Wah!!  That's the way it goes!

Water Droppering

Here is a new water activity on the Practical Life shelves.  To do this work, the children use the dropper to place one drop in each round section of the suction pad.  Then they carefully remove each drop and return it to the bowl.  The sponge is used to wipe up the inevitable little spills. 

 

The next photo shows the suction pad with a few drops on it.

Build a Flower Garden

This activity was born out of my imagination this past weekend.  To be honest, during the time I was taking a break from the blog I was kind of going through Montessori block......like writer's block, you know?  I knew I needed to get some new things on the shelves, but Easter had passed and I was kind of blank about what to pull together.  The way I usually come up with new activities is by browsing through the stash of materials in my classroom (and I am blessed to have inherited a lot of materials), browsing dollar stores, and browsing thrift stores.  I had seen a fun flower button board over at Chasing Cheerios and that idea was going through my head as I browsed my stash this weekend.  I'd still like to make Melissa's version sometime, but the following activity is what I came up with using the items I had on hand.  First, I found a piece of the florist foam I used for my rainbow work.  Then I remembered the wooden sticks I'd found in the dollar section of my local discount store last fall.  My lightbulb moment occurred when I realized that if I found the right beads I could set this up as a flower making work.  Then I realized that I had the perfect beads........these foam beads from Discount School Supply were sitting in the bottom of my art cupboard patiently waiting to be utilized in an activity.

So........I placed the chunk of floral foam on the tray with 6 green wooden sticks pushed in, all the way down.  (When I present this work I will tell the children that the "stems" are to stay in the foam and should not be removed.)  I added a pretty box I bought a while back at Hobby Lobby on clearance.  I've been waiting for the right activity to use it.  The foam beads are inside the box.

 

Here's a close-up of the details on the box.  It is so pretty and will be such a great point of interest for the children.

 

Here are the beads nestled inside the box.  I only put in the star shaped ones and round ones as I thought they would be the most flower-like.

 

To build a flower, the child pushes the foam beads onto the green "stem".  The foam beads are perfect because they stay on the stick without sliding down.

Flower Tree

I spent a LOT of time at school this weekend putting out new activities on the shelves.  I am really excited about a few new things I've dreamed up and can't wait to post about them here.  It was hard to decide which to post about tonight.  I decided to show you how I repurposed an activity we've had out for about a month that my students have really enjoyed.  The "flower tree" shown in the following posts is my Easter tree that has been recycled into a new activity.  The children loved hanging the Easter ornaments on this tree and as I was packing up Easter things I thought, "I wonder if we could slide beads onto the branches for a spring tree decorating activity?"  And sure enough, it worked!  Below you can see how I've set it up.  I found the cutest flower plate at my local Dollar General store.  They have a TON of really cute entertaining stuff and I bought a bunch and have several really cute activities to show you over the next week that I made using things I bought there.  The white glass basket holds the flower beads I used for this work.  Unfortunately, I don't know where the flower beads came from.  They were already in the classroom when I arrived.  Colored pony beads would work fine too and would be really pretty and colorful.

 

Here's a close-up of the flower beads. 

 

Here is the tree with all the flower beads on the branches.  Doesn't it look so springy and pretty?  I like how adding the beads to the branches requires more concentration and fine motor control than just hanging ornaments on a string.  That makes this variation a more challenging one for the students and I think they will enjoy the challenge.  I put out exactly enough beads for them to hang one on each branch.

  

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth

..........in case you were wondering.  I think I just really needed a little break from the blog.  It ended up being a little longer break than I thought it would be, but that's okay.  I am terribly behind on replying to questions some of you have left.  Please accept my apologies.  I will respond when I have the energy to do so, I promise!  In case you aren't reading my other blog, I'm kind of in a de-cluttering frenzy at home.  I am really trying to downsize all the STUFF we have so I can feel more peaceful and relaxed at home and also so I can do a better job of keeping my house really clean.  So that's taking up a lot of the time I would ordinarily spend blogging.  However, the good news is that I just returned from spending 3 hours at school so I will have lots of new things to show you soon.  Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera, but I plan to be there for at least a few more hours tomorrow, so you can look forward to a new post with activities and photos by tomorrow night.  I am pretty excited about a few of the things I've put together........so be patient.......I'll be back here very soon.  Thanks for continuing to read!!