What we've been up to this week

Here's the weekly photo gallery of what we've been up to.

The fish/bubble counting activity has been VERY popular.

Pinching clothespins is great for strengthening the finger muscles.

Using the eye dropper to fill the jack-o-lantern with colored water takes a lot of concentration and focus.

This student is laying out the large decimal cards.  He was receiving a lesson with the golden bead material and decimal cards.

As part of his lesson, I gave him decimal cards and he practiced reading the number and getting the appropriate golden bead material to match the numeral.  Then, I let him choose his own cards and show the numeral with the beads.  (He chose 999, as pictured.)  Finally, I placed some of the bead material on the rug and had him get decimal cards to show my quantity.

Another student completed the hundred board for the first time this week.

I realized recently that my weekly photo gallery has not shown much language work.  The irony is that every single day I have been giving lessons with the sandpaper letters and their corresponding activities, but I have not been photographing those lessons very much!  So, this photo shows the first four sounds in my "yellow" set of letters.  Once a child has put 4 of the sounds in their sound books, they do a picture sorting activity which is shown here.  The photo shows the backside of the cards which the student has turned over in order to correct her work.  The other side has pictures beginning with each sound.

Several students worked together for a large part of one work period building extensions with the pink tower and brown stair.  I love it when they initiate working with the sensorial materials on their own.

Here a student is doing an extension with the knobbed cylinder blocks.

This student has made a maze with the red and blue rods.  Typically this extension would be done with the red rods.  However, this child initiated it with the number rods and I did not redirect him.  The nice thing about doing this extension with the number rods is that you can reinforce numerical concepts.  For example, this child has a solid grasp of numbers 1-10.  He was having trouble constructing the maze independently (he is a first year three-year-old who has observed second year students doing this work).  When I sat to help him I was able to point out the numerical pattern (i.e. "We have the 'one', 'two', and 'three' rods; now you need the 'four' rod.") to help him understand how to finish his maze.  Once he understood this, he was able to easily complete it.

As I pointed out recently to a reader who commented on a photo in our gallery, there is always much more going on "behind the scenes" than what you see in the photo.  This photo (obviously) shows a correctly completed pink tower.  What you don't see is that prior to this "finished product" the three-year-old student worked with intense concentration for about 20 minutes to get the tower just right.  This particular student does not often choose sensorial materials on his own to work with.  I have seen him work with other children, but have rarely seen him initiate getting these materials out by himself.  As he worked on this, I was sitting at the sound table giving several lessons in succession with the sandpaper letters.  At one point I glanced over and he had the tower completed with a few cubes out of place.  He was gazing intently at his work.  A few minutes later I looked over again and saw that he had successfully corrected his work and at that point I asked him if I could photograph it.  At no point did I or my assistant go over to point out his "error".  That is the beauty of the Montessori philosophy of education.  To a large extent the materials themselves are self-correcting.  Additionally, great importance is placed on allowing children to work without interruption.  When we adults push our way into their work, we can never know the potential disruptions in learning and concentration that we may cause.  Maria Montessori wrote extensively about the need to allow children to work undisturbed.  There is SO much learning going on that we cannot see.  But sometimes, like the moments I described above, we are blessed with a little glimpse of the great potential for independent learning that lies within each child.

This photo shows the cards from Word Drawer 1.  This student has finished his red sound book and was given a lesson on the word drawers.  The picture cards were named and laid out on the table.  The word cards were then placed into an itty bitty Capri Sun bag so he could pull them out one at a time, read the word and match it to the picture.   

Comments

[Caitlin]

Hi Laura,

Love your idea of using rolls of felt to help the children with the decimal layout. Do you use the rolls when they use the golden bead material? Or do they lay it out on their rug without it?

Thanks!!
Caitlin