New curtains

I haven't been able to go into school much these past few days. I have been overloaded with trying to plan and organise a 3 day creche program. There was a lovely surprise when I went to school last Thursday: NEW CURTAINS! I asked a couple of time for the classes curtains to be changed to something simpler and more cosy. I love new curtains, they're perfect. It really adds a golden feeling to the class.

On the left under the curtain you can see a wooden dolls house, that's used for the grammar materials. I'll write about the other materials once I finish setting the whole language area.

Although I will be teaching in the 6-9 classroom, I still have to help with the setting up of the 3-6 class. One area that I wanted to redo was the cultural area. Previously the children were going onto the later cultural materials too early, because they were not ready for the materials they were being presented to they developed a bored attitude to learning. I decided to have a good look at the cultural sequence for materials. Many colleges follow different sequence, in the end I decided to use the sequence from my first Montessori college [MCI] and the years of experience i had. We have decided that the cultural materials will start with paring activities. On the shelves above we have pairing fruit, pairing berries, pairing flowers, pairing animals and pairing trees. The 2.5yr old will start with these and learn the names of all the fruits, plants, trees or animals. We will also add in some concrete pairing activities. Next we will have the zoology puzzles for the different parts of each animal and terminology cards that go with them. Next the child will go onto life cycles and then classification of the animal kingdom. I want the children to do all this before going onto the globes and puzzle maps. Its essential that the child has a good understanding of the world that they can see around them and experience everyday before teaching them about continents. That's all I can write about now, once the shelves are all set up I'll take pics and explain the sequence more.