Even More Beautiful Creatures

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I am going to say right here and right now that this particular cd is one of the luckiest purchases I have ever made.  I bought it from the op-shop with absolutely no idea what I was buying and boy did it come up shining.

Although definitely children's music, in my opinion, it is very "Parent Friendly" and doesn't go for the demeaning custey hook.  The music is lively and engaging but the real treasure here is the lyrics of the songs.  They are wonderfully full of "real" information and vocabulary.  

If it wasn't for this cd I would have no idea how to tell a leopard from a cheetah, well now I do.  Much of it is storytelling from the animal's point of view.  Due to this there is quite a bit of animals talking/singing to the audience but apart from the very emotive "A Lion has a Right to be free", and the two meercats falling in love, I would say that the way it has been handled in a pretty low key way by sticking mostly to observable behaviour rather than "feelings".  

Overall I am really happy to have this in our collection.

Days have Names, Days have Numbers

-August-

 Little Tree is really starting to get a handle on the fact that time passes, both during the day and during the week. During the day his markers are Morning tea, Lunch, Afternoon Tea and Dinner.  He is now solid on both hands at the top of the clock being Lunch time, he is even getting aware of the fact that if we haven't had lunch right on 12 that times after 12 might also be pointed out to be lunch time.  This one is a bit vague as although he is getting there he isn't totally solid on the little hand being the valid marker in this little scenario so sometimes he will mistakenly decide it's lunch before 12 but not in the dogged "is it lunch time yet?" way that led up to this need for understanding.

We have 3 activities during the week that always happen on specific days (preschool, dad day and music class). These activities that repeat every week have really solidified for him that time is not this vague amorphous thing. It was him often asking is it "preschool day" that made me realise that it would be useful to him to really see the days passing and that regular events reoccur on a 7 day pattern.  Thus the Calendar was born.

I have had this weekly planner for a while and planned to use it for mapping household jobs but the planner got lost in the move and didn't turn up until about a fortnight ago.  About the same time Kylie at How We Montessori put up her inspiration post  about calendars and I decided that was a much better use for the tool.  I first started out with just adding a dry erase number every day, we started about mid August,  but of course the first thing he did was rub them all out.  Within 24hrs it was all unreadable so I accepted that tempting a 3 yr old with something like that was really just asking for trouble.

In thinking my way though I remembered I still had some magnetic sheet designed to go through an inkjet printer.  As I no longer had a printer I decided to start with some ply wood numbers from the local discount store, that I had painted, then glued them on. I figured this gave a really robust set of numbers that would have texture if he decided some time in the future he was interested in tracing them with his finger.

To this point it's been so far, so good.  He has mostly really enjoyed the routine of matching the dry erase day number that I write up there, the night before.  He is even starting to get the idea of numbers bigger than 10 and that they might conform to some type of pattern.   Something that really seemed to be unfathomable before so not only does this seem to be working to clarify the passage of time but also that numbers are useful in more than just "counting".

I expect I will be adding a few more things, in the future, like the year and possibly some type of weather magnets but right now it seems to be working for him in this very simple and stripped down state.

-September-

New on the Shelf - Imprint Matching

Last school holidays the local council ran a series of activities at the Eurobodalla Botanic Gardens.  One of the activities for the day was "make a plant fossil".  Now as Little Tree is into dinosaurs the word fossil hooked him in.  Being who he is at this point in time Little Tree made his a plant fossil, then rolled it out and made another, rolled it out again then decided to "write his name" into to the clay and 5 minutes later had very happily completed his process by scrunching it up and making a clay rock :-)

 Thankfully though through that the inspiration, this matching was born.

I had an inkling this would be, mostly, reasonably easy for him so to make it harder I left most of  the matching objects up on his nature table so he had to find the ones he deemed most appropriate.  

That said I knew the acacia seed head imprint, top row middle, was going to be the hardest for him to find as he needed  to match something that didn't have much in the way of visual cues to shape from the imprint, if he just guessed and didn't try it from different angles it wouldn't fit.  Thus I presented all the plant materials on the tray from the beginning as a straight one to one matching tray which made, all but the acacia, very easy but gave him good insight to work with the shells tray where he needed to find the materials himself.

All the items he chose were correct to the type of material, i.e. the correct size and shape of shell. He also correctly moved them around so they sat neatly in the imprints.  As these things go that's a successful activity in our world.

Blocks, Blocks and Building

Hammer Blocks (How We Montessori)

Lego Juniors, Fire Truck & Waste Truck (Kmart)

Cars and Construction Vehicles(Siku, Matchbox)

Haba Technics Lg Vechicle Blocks + Lg Builders pack (Send a toy)

Personal Designs Record Book (contains Photo's of previous projects)

Green Inspirations Folder

Little Tree has required quite a bit of encouragement to really get into blocks and building.  

When he was younger I kept presenting block options and having them ignored.  When he was somewhere between 2.5 and 3yrs I found Haba Vechicle blocks.  With a quite a bit of time at introduction to help him replicate the designs in the included inspirations book he was off.  

In many ways these Haba  blocks have been great for his ongoing development.  Getting the wheels and block clips on and off the blocks  has built hand strength along with hand eye co-ordination and using the "trailer brackets" initially required quite a bit of patience on his behalf as the connections are firm but reasonably small. Connecting the block clips also starts to build the concept of force and that somethings are stronger in certain directions than others and this is a concept that he is starting to take in

He still doesn't do a lot of architectural type "buildings" that is something I am hoping to find a way to encourage in the next 6 months.  Most of his building right now is roads, cars and robots but whatever the gateway to inspiration it's always wonderful to find his constructions  and see he is practicing lots of great skills.