There are some similarities and some differences between the Montessori and the Waldorf Steiner philosophies, the one similarity of importance to me in this post is one of quality open-ended toys made from natural materials. Two of my favourite types of Waldorf Steiner toys are the figurines from Ostheimer and the blocks from Grimm’s. I buy my toys from mainly from Honeybee Toys and Dragon Fly Toys. A really hasn’t shown much interested in imaginative play with these toys because he is all about cars! But he has recently loved being told the fairy tales Hansel and Gretel and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. So a couple of weeks ago, I got all Waldorf Steiner and told Goldilock’s story using wooden toys - or table puppets which I think is just lovely. We used a little girl and bear figurines from Ostheimer, the nesting bowls from Grimms, some random blocks, and the wooden planks my dad and I made. He loved it so much that we did it five times in one sitting! He has since told me the story a heap more, sometimes using the toys. Sometimes he will sneak in a line from the story during our conversations. The other day we were running the bath and I asked him if the water was too hot. His reply was ‘It’s just right.’ If you would like for more information about Waldorf storytelling please read the link here to Bella Luna Toys. Obviously around here we are big on books, but we have kept A’s fairytales fairly free from illustrated books and cartoons. No Disney fairytales in our house... yet. This has been a choice I made early on, although I do have a few beautifully illustrated fairytale books waiting to be read - I can’t help myself!
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I’ve always loved the idea of having poetry parties. I found out about this idea from Teach Beside Me but I know I’ve read about it on other blogs and also an amazing actual book which I got out of a library on homeschooling that I know I took a photo of but cannot find! A poetry party is a tea party where you read and listen poetry while you eat and sip! How cute is that! I have tried it before but I think A was just too little, and far more interested in pouring his drink from the jug into a cup and visa versa than participating in an afternoon tea or listening to poetry. Recently I read this post from Practically Hippie that got me inspired, so on Sunday when we went for a quick shop we picked out something we would like to eat at our morning tea. I picked chocolate cake, A picked chocolate teddy biscuits, and C got some crackers for the cheese we already had. We have a large selection of cheeses at the moment because the mobile cheese shop arrived at the show. I’ll post about the show soon! This time it went smashingly. I read out three poems while we ate, C got to eat cheese, and A felt grown up and special all the while covered in chocolate! It’s a terrible thing to admit as an English teacher, but I’ve never been into poetry. I guess I grew up in a place and era where it wasn’t a focus. I’ve come to appreciate poetry later in life though. I remember reading poetry once in high school from a text book activity in which the teacher must have assumed we knew more then we did because it was a bit of a failure. The other time was when we had to make an anthology of poems based on a topic, and write one ourselves. There was no analysis or any other teaching around the project. I would like A to have a love of the written word, and poetry can be so magical. I don’t need him to know poems off by heart as some homeschoolers do (to each their own) but I would like him to ‘know’ poetry. The collections we used for our tea party where:
A Poem for Every Day of the Year edited by Allie Esiri Where the Sidewalk Ends the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein A Child’s Garden or Versus by Robert Louis Stevenson Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years. An easy-to-follow, authoritative guide for enriching your child formative years. By Elizabeth G. Hainstock. So this book is suggested everywhere and by everyone. I don’t know why it took me so long to get it. I guess I have been relying on Pinterest and Blog posts for ideas about Montessori. Even though originally I had read some of Maria Montessori’s books before we had decided to start our family, and have a couple of other books that I read as well. I’ve been wanting to create a folder of our homeschool philosophies with sample curriculum and lessons. I wanted some book lists. I wanted to have a few scope and sequences to give me some guidelines as I am so used to working within a curriculum as a teacher. My first thought was that it’s smaller then I thought it was going be. The first quarter of the book is introductory information and then you get to good stuff. It covers exercises for practical-life, early sensorial, reading and writing, and arithmetic. Then there is a section on how to DIY a heap of the stuff you need for the exercises.
You can get all of this stuff online. But having an actual book that has been around since the late 60s actually lets me feel confident that this is how it is done. I’m a teacher, and I’m a laminating lover. I own two laminators, one now lives at school and the other at home. Don’t make the rookie mistake like I did and buy just an A4 laminator. Treat yourself and get an A3 one because it will do A4 easier without having to line anything up plus you can also make some larger posters. Anyhow... Back to the topic. Montessori 3 part cards. We’ve been using cards for a long time now, but I didn’t really put a lot of effort into making them beyond printing, laminating, and the cutting out. The reason for this is that A loved them a little too much. So they would end up in his mouth, in his bowl of cereal, folded up in his little clenched hand, tucked away in secret places... you get the idea. These were the first cards we used. The link to the shop where I bought them is at the bottom of this post. At the time he wanted to know all about fruit so I just followed his lead. A still loves fruit and when we can we buy unusual fruit for him to try. Today we were talking about blueberries. Back to the topic. I continue to use cards that parallel A’s interests. I prefer to use the Singapore Maths approach of concrete-pictorial-abstract. For me that means starting with realistic figurines or the real object, then moving to photographs or realistic beautiful illustrations. We haven’t gotten to abstract yet. I like to find concrete model of the items - I like Safari Toobs, Schleich, and other similar animal figurines. I usually buy mine from Minizoo. I then do a interest search for Montessori cards on the topic. There are heaps of places to find cards. I’m happy to pay cards because it saves me time. If I can’t find them I’ll make them mainly using Wikipedia photos. I’ll add some links at the end of places I buy from 😊 I own a colour laser printer, it’s getting old but it still holds up well, even though I have trouble getting it to work on the network half the time. I made these cards, they are common Australia butterflies. Now that we doing this Montessori thing with a little more fidelity I have started backing the cards in the correct colour and then laminating. I still cut straight from the paper and don’t leave a plastic boarder around my cards. This is an issue because I’m so clumsy. If your cards get wet the paper will suck up the liquid under the laminating. See this is what happens you spill your drink all over them. Also be sure to glue your photos down properly onto the backing paper because your laminator can still chew it up as it goes through the rollers It takes me a few days to get through a card set because I do them while A is playing ‘independently’. He can get to see the cards and takes an interest in them, but it’s not until I get out the models that it really captures his attention. Links:
Pinay Homeschooler Shop Montessori for Everyone Montessori Printshop The fruit cards came from Montessori for Everyone The water transport cards and butterfly life cycle cards came from Pinay Homeschooler Shop 2 years 11 months Before going to bed we let A play something with us, usually a board game but tonight he wanted to play the ‘whale game’. The ‘whale game’, as he calls, it is actually some three part cards I created featuring some big sea creatures. I’ll talk about them in another post I promise! After he played the ‘whale game’ and packed it up with some prompting as to what goes where, he then got out the pink tower. Ignore the toilet rolls in the background 😂 It has been a few weeks since he tried this, so I was interested to see how he went. He was awesome. He even tried to ‘trick’ me with a few fake block choices😆. Although he’s still not so good at packing it away gently. I didn’t get a photo of him jumping up and down so excited that he built it 😞 He then put the pink tower basket away, rolled up his mat, and put it away, all the while telling me how he liked the grey mat. He then brushed his teeth with a little bit of assistance, gave me a hug and a kiss, and toddled off into his bedroom with an arm full of cars and his dad.
Gosh I love Montessori and Dad’s turn for bed time duty. Space Match from The Learning Journey International What is not to like about this game right? It has space rockets on it! And shapes! I bought this at the perfect time for A, and it was cheap! I bought off Catch of the Day but it doesn’t look like it’s available from there anymore. What does it come with? 4 thick cardboard boards with shapes and rockets on them A heap of thick cardboard coins with individual shapes printed on them A yellow plastic dispenser How do we play it? We don’t follow the rules on the box. I don’t like the idea of teaching A to snatch at things but hey, life is a choose-your-own-adventure, and if that’s how you roll you do so. We each select a board. We take turns at using the dispenser which is actually pretty cool to use. If you can match your coin to a shape on your board the. you place it over that matching shape. Otherwise, it goes back into the dispenser. Sometimes we take the coins out and give them a shuffle if we don’t seem to be getting any matches. Educational benefits This game has helped A learn his shapes. The shapes are: circle, ellipse, octagon, rhombus, star, triangle, and circle. I think that’s all. So there are a few unusual shapes which get over looked normally. Playing it in the manner we do also means that A learns about taking turns. He doesn’t always win, and some turns are disappointing because he doesn’t get a match. I bought this 2 months ago, so A was 2 years and 7 months.
The first time we played, A wanted to pull the lever on the dispenser over and over again. It’s fun so I can’t blame him. He also didn’t really understand that we each had our own boards. His concentration wasn’t long enough to finish a game either. It only took a couple of rounds though for him to get the hang of it. He then wanted to play it a lot! Now he pulls this one off the shelf to play once a week. During one of my late night Pinterest reads I found a great article about a method of home schooling that I have fallen in love with, simply because it’s where I’m at in my own classrooms and in our house. Click the image below to read the actual article by The Mulberry Journal which is a bit of a how to and faq so head there and read it. But basically Gameschooling is using games to teach. My husband and I have long loved card and board games as well as puzzles, so it was natural for us to want to include A in this. But seeing as though A is still little I’ve found that board games for under 3s are a little hard to source. I’m planning on doing a series of posts about what games we have - and I also want to get buy some more off my wish list to review as well. Can we officially call ourselves a Montessori home now that we have a pink tower? Terrible blur but that’s how it goes. The first three block were presented and then he did it himself. Not too shabby. Although then he knocked them down 🤭 Dude! Those blocks cost money 💰 I bought them from A 2 Z Montessori - I’ve bought from them before and will do so again. Super quick to courier my order so I got it within 2 days. Update - We tried to the pink tower again today, I thought we should try the first five size he did so well yesterday. I shouldn’t have bothered and just gave him the whole thing. He was keen to get in. It’s so hard to not touch and fix! But when he made a mistake I asked him to notice it, does this look right? I also asked that when it knew it was right. I’ve packed the two 1cm block away because they will totally go missing!
2 years 8 months For a long time, even before getting pregnant, my husband and I wanted our children to be independent particularly with food preparation. I took these photos over a number of days, so please don’t think A just eats ham and cheese 😆. A can make his own breakfast. He can get a bowl and spoon. He can get a Wheetbix out of the panty, crunch it up, and pour in the milk. I pour the milk into the jug while he is busy with his crunching. What about lunch? Putting together a cheese and ham wrap isn’t an issue. Squish the cat gets involved too. Here’s A prepping pizzas 🍕 ’Sprinkle sprinkle sprinkle’ he says as he sprinkles the cheese over the sauce. On goes the ham and pepperoni. Delicous! How about an egg sandwich? A’s not up to peeling the shells although he had a go - it was just a little too hard. But he could mash them up! He mixed in the mayonnaise and then spread it into his sandwich. Although A cannuse the rest of the kitchen - this is own area. Here we keep all his cup, bowls, plates and jugs. He also can use this fridge for his drinks and snacks. He does grab a chair and pulls open the big fridge and the pantry to get stuff out of there too. Opposite the fridge and shelf, A has a small table and chairs and a set of drawers which are actually empty at the moment
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AuthorHi, I'm Pamela. A nail crazy lady with green hair. I live in outback Queensland with my toddler and my husband. I love books, writing and crafting. For more info about me go to my 'About' page. Archives
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