Flower Arranging

Everyday we have a vase full of fresh flowers on display in the Practical Life area.

Below the vase we have a flower arranging activity which is basically a tray that contains various small vases and a pair of scissors.

Children are shown how to take a vase, fill it half way with water and use the scissors to cut the flowers they would like in their vase.

Here is an example of a four year old's flowers. Very nice!

The child can then take their vase to the table that their working at and put in the top left corner of their table. Having flowers at a child's table makes such a difference to their concentration and well-being.

Months of The Year

Last week Little-N was working on learning the spellings for the Months. I have a simple activity in which he places the months around the sun to represent our earths orbit of the sun. I have posted about this before here.

After making sure he knows all the spellings we moved onto looking at the abbreviations for each month and the numerals which can be used to represent the month.

The file for this activity can be downloaded for free from my shop.http://thelearningark.com/content/months-year

Washing Tables

This week I set up two washing tables for the children. One table is for washing hands and the other is for washing the dirty cloths from polishing and cleaning activities. Here are what the tables look like:

Hand washing table:

Cloth washing table:
The older children in the classroom have really enjoyed working with these activities. They have developed a sense of responsibility for the cleanliness of the classroom and have spent a lot of time on the cleaning activities in the class.

The Start of a New Montessori School

Finally I have found the time to blog! I've worked my entire summer, day and night setting up and preparing a Montessori school. With the help of many volunteers and parents we managed to have the school ready for it's opening on the 12th of September.

I wanted the start of the school to be smooth and tranquil allowing the children, parents and staff to have a peaceful time to settle in. To achieve this we decided to stagger our intake over a period of three weeks, starting with the oldest children. This allowed each group of children to bond with the staff and settle in the environment before the next group started. The youngest children started at the beginning of this week, this was the group I was most anxious about as some of the children have just turned 3. Amazingly our week ended with a classroom of happy and peaceful children.

A lot of time, effort, research and skill was put into the design and layout of the classroom to provide the best environment for the children. I haven't got photos of the whole classroom to share however I do have a photo of one of my favorite features: the child sized sink. With the help of two handy parents, we managed to find away to install a kitchen sink at the perfect height for children. I set the sink area up with all the necessary tools needed for children to independently wash their own dishes, this has become one of our most loved activities.

Now that things have settled and calmed I hope to post regularly about our environment and experiences. I'll also be posting about Little-Ns work and homeschooling.