Lots of weaving

In my classroom I have taken away the early practical life activities and started to put more advanced work. I started the class with simple practical life activities for a reason you can read about in this post and this post. I no longer need the simple activities any more, but practical life is still equally important for older children. Over the next few weeks I will be adding many interesting advanced practical life activities, some indoors and some outdoors. I will try to post about as many as I can.

To start off, weaving has been a big hit with the boys. The first picture shows a circular weaving loom, I like this as it is short and simple so a child could maybe finish it in a day or two. This loom makes really cute weaved circles perfect for coasters. I bought mine for 20p but I am sure that you can easily make one at home.

This is a wooden weaving loom that I bought for £1 and its perfect. Really well made and simple to work with. One of the older boys [8yrs] sat and weaved for 30mins! We haven't completed a mat yet, so I am excited to see their faces once I take the mat of the loom.

You can easily make a loom and I blogged about the ones I made years ago here. These are nice because each child can have their own loom. Unfortunately only a few children actually finished their work, so we had many unfinished looms in the classroom. The wooden loom pictured above is for collective work, all children get to do a bit and when its finished we will use the mat in my classroom.

Years ago we also made felt weaved mats which the children took to display at home. The instructions for them are here.

Activities of the week : June 2010

Here are some pictures of this weeks work. My class has three children Big-S who is nine and a half, Little-N who is 6 and Little-S who is almost 6.

Little-S working with the plain binomial cube.

Big-S making patterns from geometric tiles.

Big-S learning the names of the counties of England and Wales. I got this map at a car boot sale for £1.50.

Little-S working with ten beads. Revising quantities till 90.

Little-S working with the Teen board and beads.

Little-N on a trip to science museum to visit 1001 inventions exhibition.

Children baked cinnamon rolls.

Little-N having lunch in the garden.

Little-N working with 6 bead chain.

Little-N building the Eiffel tower.

Little-S working with a tangram.

Little-N reading history books

Little-S working with continent map work.

Big-s cutting out hexagons and pentagons. More details in a separate post.

Big-S sewing hexagons together

Little-N's work with grammar symbols.

Little-N working on division board.

Big-S constructed a bucky ball, the kit is from here.

Big-s making a buggy kit.

Snow Decorations

We still have snow outside!!! A new term has started and all the children are excited about the lovely change of weather. This week we started off by decorating our classroom with snowflakes and stars.

Above is a beautiful paper snowflake hanging in our door way. It's very easy to make, there is a tutorial for it here.

The children made loads of paper snowflakes. Each one came out different even if they tried to make them the same. They really enjoyed it and our windows look lovely :)

Paper Star Book

Recently I made paper star books with my children at school. They're really easy to make and the children only have to know a few basic folds to make one. Here is a mini [not so good] tutorial:

What you need:

Square pieces of paper [for the above book I used 10]

2 square pieces of card that are cut to the size of your folded paper

String

Glue

and Cello tape

Step 1: Fold a square piece of paper in half on both sides. Unfold. Turn the piece of paper over so that you can see the back of the previous folds and fold diagonally once. Unfold. Turn over.

Step 2: hold the paper so that the diagonal fold is horizontal and the bottom point is towards you. Next squish in the to horizontal points so that it looks like the above and squash it down into a square. Yes I know my instructions are not so good so you can follow the instructions here. You need to fold all your square papers as above.

Step 3: Cut out two pieces of card that are a few millimetres bigger than your folded paper squares. You can cover the card with wrapping paper on one side.

Step 4: Using Cello tape stick the string to the card as above so that it runs through each piece of card [corner to corner] and leave about 4 inches on either side.

Step 5: Stick a folded square to the card so that the open corner is lined up to the corner with the string.

Step 6: Stick your other squares on top, making sure that they all open up in the same direction. Once you have stuck down all your squares, stick the second piece of card on top.

In the background of the picture above you can see all the squares that have been folded. This book was actually made by one of my 9 year old students.

The strings are to hang the book as decoration or to tie the book closed. You can open each page in the book and write in it, then fold it closed again.

I know this tutorial isn't all that great and I'm not sure whether its actually clear enough to follow. If your finding it difficult leave me a comment and I'll answer it.

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 :)

Thought I'd like to share a classroom organising idea. The children at school have been sewing a lot recently, so I've had to buy some more supplies. After a few children get into the thread drawer it looks a bit like this, which isn't neat enough for a Montessori classroom. 

Organising the threads was a project we did one morning. A girl mentioned that her mom has a little box with pieces of plastic that each thread is wound on. So we got a big piece of thick card and cut strips of it as long as the drawer and about 3 cm wide.  We cut small triangles out on each end as above.

All the children wanted to join in the winding, it was a very social activity. Once all the threads were wound on their card pieces we put them back in the drawers and they looked as neat as could be.

Weaving

Recently the children in my class have been weaving with paper, felt and wool. I start the children off with simple paper weaving, then felt weaving and then I move them onto string weaving on a weaving loom.

To make the felt mat, you need an A4 piece of felt and felt strips. Fold the A4 piece in half lenght ways and starting from the folded end cut straight lines up to the top making sure you stop before the edge. My slits were about 1 inch apart. This is the same technique used when making a paper lantern. Next give the children strips of different coloured felt and show them how to weave those in. I used a stapler or pegs to secure the felt strips in place while weaving. After all the strips have been weaved in, sew the edges. This is Little-N's mat, he decided to make a pattern with his colours.

Those children who were successful on weaving a felt mat soon moved onto making a weaving loom. I decided that I want each child to have their own loom they can work on when they wish [instead of just one classroom loom]. I made a cardboard loom for each child following instructions found here. The older children made their own looms with a few directions from me. Everyone seems to doing a bit of weaving daily. I'm using all my left over yarn from knitting projects in my weaving loom and its nice to see how I can have bits of all my projects in one weaved mat.

Spriamouse

Today we had fun with a spiramouse [an automatic Spirograph], its really easy to use and Little-N enjoyed the beautiful patterns he could make. The spiramouse is quite cool as you can place up to 13 pens at the same time to make all sorts of patterns. All you do is place the pens, press a button and watch.

Even Annabel [the cat] enjoyed it.
Little-N choose coordinating colours and when finished doing all the patterns he could fit on a single piece of paper, he cut them out and we made window hangers.

Origami star tree

I really shouldn't be blogging now, I'll be leaving for Cairo tomorrow morning and I'm not even ready [and seem to be going down with a cold]. BUT I couldn't resist sharing these beautiful Christmas trees with everyone. I wish I could take credit for them, but I won't I'll be honest. These cute trees were made by one of our teaching practice [intern] students as a gift for the school. We both share an interest in origami and made loads of stars months ago, however she spent 10 hrs last night [yes of course she doesn't have kids] making this big tree and a little one for each child. Just in case you didn't recognise this, each tree is made from mini origami stars.




These are extremely simple to make. All you need is lots of strips of papers varying in width slightly and some glue. You can find a tutorial for the star folding here and here. Make as many stars as you wish, then stack them and secure with a little glue. We told the children that all they need to do is build it like the pink tower. With the large tree we added some glue, glitter and golden foil. Don't you think they look great??