Our Montessori Lessons

I have had a few friends ask what lessons I work on with Will at home and I thought it would be nice if I just explained his winter lessons.

We just love the Montessori method and how kids so naturally gravitate towards it that we have been implementing more of it at home since we moved to Houston.  William currently goes to a preschool that uses many of the Montessori methods, but isn't as traditional as the one he attended in San Antonio.  Every afternoon we spend about an hour on his at-home lessons.  Some days are great days and others he complains about "not wanting a teacher at home" LOL!  Too bad for him that his momma is a teacher.  Just wait until he starts chemistry! :)  Part of the Montessori method is that students can reach their work on their own without adult help.  All of these lessons are on a bookcase on the lower shelves.  Each lesson is compartmentalized in either a tray or some type of box that he can easily manipulate.  He has to treat his work with respect and he can work with it either on his table or on his rug.  It takes me about 3 hours a month to prepare the work.  That includes internet search time, printing, cutting, and laminating.  Now that I am building a collection it won't take as much time as we do this every month. 

This winter William wanted to learn more about snow and the season in general.  I try to change out his themed work every month or so, and we always have a moveable alphabet , number beads , and books as part of his lessons.  We have to help him with both of those still, but he is really starting to be able to put words together with the letters using the moveable alphabet.  We have really noticed that he is able to actually read words now.  The other day Sara was making a grocery list and had written kitty litter down.  He picked up the paper and said "Momma. Who is Katy?"  Pretty good for really just starting on this a few weeks before Christmas! 

We are going slower on the number beads than what the link above shows. Sara wanted to make sure that he easily understands the concepts of 0-10 before moving on to bead work with the teens and tens (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc).  He has a great concept of 0-10 and we are working on teens and tens.  Then we will move on to basic addition and subtraction. While he and Sara were working on lessons today he just started counting on his own and was able to make it to 30 without any help or mistakes.  Woo hoo!!!

So here are some examples of what we are working on this winter.  Sara will probably add some Valentine's themed activities in February, and she has some more activities planned for later in January when his current work gets "too boring".   For now here is what we are working on...

Animals in Winter-Learning about hibernation, migration, and adaptation. He also sorts the animals by which category they belong in.

Sorting the Animals in Winter

Sound recognition with the letter S.

Choosing which objects start with "s"

Sorting colors and learning the colors in Spanish

Working on color sorting

Counting cards where he must identify the number of snowflakes.  He then adds a snowflake on the correct number.

Counting the snowflakes in action

Using probability to build a snowman

 These are just a few of the things we have planned this month.  Some of the pictures have links to the websites we downloaded the material from.  There are a ton of free websites out there. 

We really enjoy doing this at home because it keeps Will entertained and not wanting to watch tv or play video games :)

Enjoy,
The Tates