I love awards

A while ago I received two blog awards :), many thanks to those who nominated me!

The first award is from Leptir:

Rules for the award- Tell your readers 10 things about you that they may or may not know, but are true. Tag ten people with the award, and be sure to let them know they have been tagged (a quick comment on their blog will do). Don't forget to link back to the blogger who tagged you.

So here are ten things:

1. I just started a Montessori degree course today

2. I'm a vegy

3. My favourite colour is purple

4. Last week I left school after 6 every day

5. I'm about to start a research project about handwriting

6. I believe 100% in the montessori method, no one can even try to convince me that something is wrong as I have an answer for everything!

7. I used to do a lot more crafts and art, slowly the time for these things have vanished

8. I don't have a sense of smell

9. Little-N looks just like me when I was 5 :)

10. I drive a VW

I would like to pass this award onto the following blogs

Our Montessori Chronicles

Montessori Spanish

Montessori Ponderings

The wonder years

Montessori candy

The Magnifying Glass

coloured buttons

Montessori Secrets

Mi escuelita Montessori

Life with our boys

The second award was from Spors in the Desert

I'll pass this award onto the following four blogs

Adventures of a rainbow Mama

Beautiful sun Montessori

Itty Bitty Love

Montessori en el hogar

First week of school

School reopened and we have had a wonderful very busy week!

I'm so happy that the week went well [I panic a few days before school starts], the children went straight to work and everyone continued as if they have been here all throughout the summer.

This year I have 6 children ranging from the age of 5.5 to 9. We decided not to take on any new children and instead focus on giving these six children 100%.

Day 1 started with a recap of the responsibilities of the class. We have three responsibilities :

1. To respect the environment, each other and the materials

2. To choose suitable work and complete the activities

3. To prevent disturbance

Once the children were reminded of their responsibilities they were allowed to freely choose work. Most children immediately went to the library and looked at the new books we had. Some children got out the maps and another decided to start the school year with a poem.

Last year was very free and easy going, this year I plan to have a bit more structure. The day schedule is as follows

9.00 the children arrive and go straight to the garden. At this age the children come to school full of energy and have lots to say to each other. In the garden, I get them to run around and chat as much as they want so that when we come into the class everyone is calmer and ready to work.

9.30 The children come into the class and we have the morning group. Each morning my group is different, I usually do three things. An action activity, a grace and courtesy lesson, and a little talk about something interesting that is relevant to that day. The group lasts 15-20mins.

9.45 The children set off to work. Some of the children are working from individual weekly plans which I plan with them on Mondays. The other children are working from daily plans which we plan daily. The children can freely choose any activity in the class whether its on their daily plans or not, but they must complete the work on their plans. I check their plans regularly to ensure that everyone is on track. The children are allowed to take their activities to the garden and work, but during the workcycle the children can not run, climb or use the slide in the garden.

12.30 - 1.30 The children tidy the class, check everything is in order and then prepare for lunch. After they eat their lunch they can run around in the garden and play games.

1.30 The children come back inside the classroom for a short group [5mins] and then everyone returns to work.

2.45 The children tidy up and do their cleaning chores.

3.00 Everyone gets ready to go home, except Little-N who always stays late with me as I finish things off

So far this schedule is working great, but I am prepared to change it as needed. A Montessori teacher should always be ready to adapt and change her class to suit the children's needs.

Now for the interesting part, a few pictures of work that I managed to capture during the week:

Sanding the wooden beams in the garden. We purposely left these poles un-sanded so that they children can do them.

Little-N feeling Autumn, working with the leaves cards that I got from Absorbentminds.co.uk

Recap on Grammar work.

These children chose to research about parrots.

Working with the parts of a volcano cards.

Map of Europe work.

Grammar Shelf

School will reopen next Tuesday :) and I've slowly been preparing my classroom for the new year. Today I reorganised the Grammar shelves. It took at least 6 hours and I have a few things left to do. I'm soo tired!!!

This is a picture of the grammar farm. The boxes in the front contain the word cards and the basket to the right holds the small objects for the farm. The children don't use all the objects at once, instead I encourage them to choose 6-8 noun cards and take the corresponding objects to a mat. Then they can take the parts of speech that we have studied and build sentences using the cards. As you can see everything is beautifully colour coded.
This shelf contains the box of grammar symbols [to the left], the grammar terminology cards, the grammar booklet and the grammar solids.

On this shelf I have 'Past and Present box', ' Infinitive Verb box', 'Article box' and 'The article game box'. The article game is an activity where the children choose either 'an' or 'a' to put before a noun. I also have a vase of three different flowers that are used for introducing adjective. To the right is the detective adjective game [which i will post about later].
The top shelf in the above picture isn't grammar! I thought I'd also share how I keep the classroom reading books. the little brown shelf unit is soooo handy and was about to be thrown away when someone thought I might find use for it. On the top I have placed the insets for design which my children use to make patterns. To the left I have a few series of phonetic reading books and a dictionary. To the right I have 8 stages of the Oxford Reading Tree books. I must say these are every child's favourites and have been a great investment! The small shelves in the middle contain the sight words boxes and a few grammar introduction boxes for the children to work with.

A new addition to the shelves are these grammar symbols practice cards. These are used to reinforce the symbols used for the different parts of speech. There are two different levels.

The first level has a sentence written on the front. The child reads the sentence and places the correct symbols above each word. . .

The the child flips over the card to see if s/he put the correct symbols. The child then writes the sentence in his/her grammar book and draws the symbols above.
The next cards have a string of symbols. The child takes a card and writes his/her own sentence using the symbols as a guide. I encourage the children to write the words in the correct colours.

There are other grammar activities but these are not ready on shelves. Instead the children have a list of materials that they should collect for the lesson. There is another grammar series which I haven't found the time to make yet.

Order of Life Science Materials

Recently I was asked about the order for presenting the cultural materials. There are many different orders, when I trained 3-6 I took one way and for the 6-9 another. The below is the order that I feel works best for the children and gives the a solid understanding of life sciences.

1. Living and non-living with objects:

Activity: Children gather objects from around the class or garden and place them under the heading cards.

2. Living and non-living with picture cards.

Activity: Children sort the pictures and put them under the headings.

3. Living, non-living and once living.

Activity: Children gather objects for each heading. The teacher explains the concept of once living.
4. Plant kingdom and Animal kingdom:

Activity: Teacher explains that living things can be divided into kingdoms. Most of the living things belong to the plant or animal kingdoms [I do explain that their are also other kingdoms but go into details later on]. I use pictures for this activity and the children sort them and place them under the headings 'plant kingdom' or 'animal kingdom'

Next we take each kingdom and look at the divisions within it. For example the animal kingdom:

5. Vertebrates and Invertebrates:

Activity: For this I use 3 part cards, and information card and objects.

6. Classification of Animal kingdom 2 : vertebrates

Activity: The children match the pictures and objects for the different animal groups in the vertebrates. After this they can go onto study the parts of the body for each group and then the life cycles.
7. Classification of Animal Kingdom 1: Invertebrates

This is done the same as above.

I have all these activities as PDF files as well as the body part cards and life cycles cards. You can get them here.

Woodcarving

There's something indescribable about the joy of turning a block of wood to a piece of art. I'll post a pic of the finished frame once its varnished :)

Is it time for him to move?

Little-N is supposed to be going to year 1 next year in a mainstream school and I'll be honest but I haven't even given that a thought till now. I have not visited any schools, I didn't send in any applications and I didn't even discuss the matter with his dad! I just turned a blind eye to the whole non-Montessori school idea.

Last year Little-N was between my 6-9 classroom and the 3-6 classroom lead by a group of other teachers. He was allowed to come into my class, not because he was my son but because academically many of the materials he was using were in there and many of the lessons he needed to take were part of the 6-9 classroom. He was also able to follow the intense learning that was going on in my class, where as some other children of the same age would come in and not like the 'hard work' that was going on and leave. There were days and weeks where Little-N would stay in the 3-6 class but eventually he always came back to my class. He didn't always work with me, sometimes the mother-son relationship was awkward and he would choose to do an activity from my class with another teacher from the other class.

I can definitely say that Little-N learnt so much this last school year and I believe it was the combination of being allowed the freedom to work between the 3-6 and 6-9 class and the back up he got at home when he had me all for himself. He can read very well for his age, he started writing independently and he even attempts writing stories. He is so mathematically advanced I can't explain, he has amazing knowledge of geography, science, culture and history and he's acquired many life skills that have made his life easier.

This year will be different. My school no longer has a group of 4-5 year olds as all of them have moved onto mainstream. Little-N will be the only 5 year old and there will be a 1 year gap between him and the younger children and the older children!!! It doesn't really bother me, but I'm guessing Little-N will be in my class a lot more now. That means that Little-N and I will be face-2-face 24 hours a day! Sometimes that gets a bit hard for me, especially that I'm a single mum and can't just drop him off at his dads or something [to do that I'll have to travel all the way across continents]. There are days that I just need my me time.... that's why I put him to bed early.

Back to the subject: My class will still have only have six children aged 6-9 + Little-N who is 5. So I'm lucky that I don't have that many children to work with this year, although I would love more as in some strange way the class works better with more children. I will be setting up new materials at the end of August and I hope to post about them if i get the chance.

Anyways the whole purpose of this post was to state my reasons for keeping him in a Montessori school next year instead of taking the easier option of sending him to a mainstream school [drop him off at another school, picking him up at 4 and not have to think about his learning sounds a lot easier to me!!]. So here are my reasons

1. Little-N is already quite an independent learner sending him into mainstream will mean that he cant pursue his own interests independently.
2. Little-N has already covered a lot of the Year1 curriculum, if he goes into mainstream, he will be relearning things he already knows for almost half of the year.
3. I visited the best mainstream school in my area with the children from my school who will be moving there. On the visit my class was allowed to attend the session that was going on in that school. Little-N had his first taste of mainstream schooling and he made me laughed. The teacher was talking about geometric solids to a group, she held up a square based pyramid and asked all the 30 children on the mat what it is. Little-N just started to say Square based.... and she said 'no its not a square'. Little-N said ' Yes it is a square based pyramid, look at its base!' In someway I don't think the usual teachers and the curriculum of a mainstream school will add anything positive to Little-Ns education if he moves there next year.
4. Respect, love, friendship, forgiveness and many other beautiful characters are not developed in the state schools in my area. It's very important for me that Little-N develops these important characters from a young age and that's exactly what Montessori does.
5. At the moment, if he doesn't hear what someone says he'll say 'Pardon' I'm pretty sure if he went to state school he'll say 'waaa' or 'what'
6. In a Montessori school, Little-N is allowed to be himself at all times. He is allowed to dig for bugs at anytime, he is allowed to do a project about anything he chooses, he is allowed to learn something new when he wants to and he is never held back because of a curriculum.
7. Being a only child raised in a single parent family, Little-N does have some issues that come up every once in a while. At my school, the head teacher takes an interest in his 'issues' and she personally helps him [and me at times] through them in a loving way. I know he would never get the same love in another school.

I know there are many more reasons but for some reason I can't think of them now. Perhaps the above are much more important that other reasons have disappeared.

So the plan is that Little-N will continue to attend a Montessori school and he will be part of my 6-9 class :) . Therefore I will continue blogging about his learning and keep you updated.

Science Boxes

It's the summer holiday and I'm supposed to be planning and preparing my class for next year! However I just can't seem to get in the swing of things this holiday and instead I feel like I need a break!! Here is what I'm working on:

I thought a lot about the experiment side of science and wanted to come up with something that will create little scientists, who can experiment with what they are interested in at their own time. So I made experiment boxes that contain a variety of materials that can be used by the children independently. I have divided the boxes into air, magnetism, water, sound and light.

The children can take a box at anytime and will find in it interesting materials that they can use.

Above is the air box.

The box also contains easy lesson plans for the children to follow. For the air box I have about 15 different experiments for them to try. When they first work on a box they should choose a lesson plan, read it, gather the materials they need and do the experiment on it. Later as they learn how to use all the materials they can make up their own experiments. I used 'The big book of Science experiments' for the lesson plans. So far this is the best experiment book I have found!

At the moment my children will be working with one box at a time and experimenting with one element. But as they become skilled scientists they can begin to mix the boxes and see the relation between two or three elements i.e: light and sound.